


Knightfall

by attackamazon



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, F/M, Forgiveness, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Interrogation, Lyrium Addiction, Lyrium Withdrawal, Red Templars, Redemption, Romance, Templars, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-22 14:19:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 47,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4838381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attackamazon/pseuds/attackamazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Combined kink-meme prompts:  "What if the Inquisitor had been an ally of Corypheus before the Conclave?" and "What if the Inquisitor had been a Templar from the beginning?"  To that I say, why not both?</p><p>The only thing Ser Magna Trevelyan ever wanted was to protect others and do the right thing.  Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple, and it's far too easy to wind up on the wrong side of history when everything you ever believed in collapses around you.  After the disaster at the Conclave, after she is a revealed to be a servant of the Elder One and therefore a heretic and traitor, as a prisoner of the newly declared Inquisition and the only one with the power to close the rifts, Magna is faced with no good choices.  She can save hundreds of innocent lives - perhaps even her own - but only at the risk of betraying the Elder One, her brothers of the new Red Templar Order, and the one person in the world she truly trusts, her mentor Samson.  What do you do when loyalty and decency collide and every possible outcome hurts?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shield of Shame

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the kink-meme. I saw two prompts that were clearly thinking along the same lines and decided to combine them for a more interesting story. I've got a couple of things planned for the romance, so I don't want to spoiler them, but Cullen will be a major factor in it. I plan to do this in a small handful of chapters, but we'll see how it goes, it might get longer.
> 
> I should note here at the beginning that this chapter contains a graphic torture scene, hence the M rating. The prompt specifically requested this. It's not as bad as it could be, but your mileage may vary so if that squicks you, read with caution.

The cells beneath Haven’s chantry were cold and cramped, the stone kept perpetually chilled by the frozen earth that surrounded it.  Slow-burning braziers trailed tarry smoke along the ceiling and provided some light, but they did little to bring any warmth to the air.  This was by design, Leliana knew, glad for her own layers of arming coat, maille, and cloak as she entered the small dungeon and nodded to the soldier who was on duty there.  The basement chambers had been intended primarily to store wine, books, parchment, and other things that kept better at cool and unvarying temperatures, but a chilly night spent in the cells had likely made more than one penitent rethink their crimes over the centuries. 

Until lately, the village had little need for a proper gaol.  The cells usually only saw the occasional drunkard or brawler sent down to cool off for a night and face a stern lecture from the Chantry Mother in the morning.  Even with the chaos of the Conclave’s destruction and the ensuing crisis of the Breach, the cells remained empty.  All save one.

“She’s not dead,” Master Adan remarked without looking up from where he sat to one side of the small space with his vials and potions, squinting in the dim light as he scribbled notes into his ledger.  He was not a young man, but not yet old either.  His dark hair was shorn close to his head and his scruffy growth of beard sported a streak of grey here and there.  His expression seemed perpetually set in a look of irritated concentration.

This was the same answer that the gruff alchemist had given her for the last two days.  He was no physician, but all of the more experienced healers had died at the Conclave and so he was the only one competent enough to deal with the aftermath - and, he was right.  Though no one had really expected her to survive, his patient was still alive.

What intelligence Leliana had been able to gather quickly had pinpointed the woman as Ser Magna Trevelyan, the daughter of a devout and prestigious noble house in Ostwick and a Templar.  She had taken her vows just before the mage rebellion had begun in earnest and had disappeared into the chaos of the conflict shortly after, presumed dead until she had stumbled home unexpectedly a little more than a month before the Conclave.  The story she told had been grim.  Some of her patrol had decided to split from Chantry control and there had been a mutiny.  She had, at last, escaped and returned to her post.  As a reward for her loyalty and perseverance, she had been assigned to accompany her great aunt, a prominent Mother in the Ostwick Chantry, to the Conclave as guard and aide.  And it was there, apparently, that her true intent had come to light.

“She should be dead,” said Cassandra severely from the archway of the gaol.

Leliana turned to shoot a pointed look behind her at the Navarran Seeker.  They had discussed what was to be done with the fallen Templar several times already since the disaster had occurred.  As colleagues of long standing, she was more than familiar with the Seeker’s aggressive impatience.  The knowledge that they had not been able to protect the Divine weighed heavily on Cassandra, Leliana knew, and that was one more source of fuel for the Seeker’s anger.

“We need her,” Leliana replied, as she had done many times before, unwilling to argue the issue. 

Justice and expedience rarely ran side by side.  The prisoner was the only one who could give them answers.  If she lived long enough.

Trevelyan was still unconscious, Leliana quickly noted, though the former Templar’s body shivered noticeably on the mat of clean straw in the corner of the cell.  She was human, well-built, and otherwise apparently healthy aside from the glowing Mark on her hand and its side-effects.  Someone, perhaps Adan out of a sense of professional duty, had gathered her damp, dark blonde hair away from her face and Leliana could see beads of sweat standing out on her skin.  The shivering was not from the cold.

“Will she recover?” 

Adan looked up at the question, and Leliana could see the weariness and frustration in the lines on his face.  The alchemist was doing his best and it was not an easy job that they had assigned him.  She gentled the severity of her expression to encourage him as he sighed.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Sister.  Maybe?  The Mark isn’t spreading anymore.  I don’t know if the damage is permanent, though the worst of it looks to be over.  Her eyes move as if she were dreaming.  She whimpers nonsense sometimes.  That's an improvement, I suppose, but who knows if she will wake up again?  I’ve done all I can.  If anything kills her now, it’ll likely be the lyrium withdrawal.” Adan ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair, shaking his head.  “Maybe she deserves this, but it’d be kinder and less a waste of my time if you just let the Seeker there put a sword through her already and have done with it.”

“Thank you.  I think we have heard enough,” Cassandra interjected stonily as she turned her dark eyes from the alchemist to Leliana.  Her expression was intense and guarded.  “Well?  What do you think?”

The prisoner’s body shuddered, twitching involuntarily as a low groan escaped her lips.  Trevelyan’s face was deathly pale, as if she were wracked with a terrible fever, and her expression was one of suffering.  Leliana had known many Templars - most of them good and faithful men and women who tried to balance vigilance and compassion.  Everything she had found so far indicated that the woman laying in the cell in front of her had been one of those good Templars once.  And now she was a murderer and a heretic - a traitor to every vow that she had ever made.  She had conspired with enemies unknown to bring about the destruction of the Conclave and the death of the Divine.  Many, many people were dead because of it.  In the end, Trevelyan had willingly gone up to the ruins of the Temple and tried to close the Breach, believing that it would likely kill her, but in Leliana's mind it was too little, too late. Trevelyan deserved no mercy.  And yet expediency demanded it.

“We need her,” Leliana said again finally.  “There will be time enough for justice after we know what we’re dealing with.”

Cassandra nodded, displeased but evidently unable to find fault with the logic.  She produced a vial from her belt pouch, handling it carefully, as she gestured for the guard to unlock the cell.  Leliana stood by, watching as the Seeker entered the enclosure and knelt over the prone form of the prisoner.

“It is a weak preparation.  Cullen indicated that it would be just enough to stabilize the worst effects of withdrawal, but not for very long,” Cassandra explained, opening the vial and lifting the woman’s head just enough to cautiously trickle the glowing lyrium philter down her throat.

The prisoner choked and coughed reflexively, but the liquid stayed down.  Within moments, her tremors eased and her breathing began to settle.  As Cassandra stood, Trevelyan took a deep breath, her eyelids struggling to open for an instant.

“Samson?” she whispered.

The prisoner's voice was hushed, cramped, and cracked with strain.  Leliana quickly searched her memory for knowledge of that name.  It was somewhat familiar, but she could not place where she had heard it before.  Before she could attempt a response, Trevelyan’s eyes closed again and her head lolled. 

Adan cursed and moved quickly past Leliana to kneel down at his patient’s side, feeling for pulse and breath, lifting back her eyelids to check her pupils.  After a tense moment, he sat back on his heels.

“She’s alive,” he explained curtly and then shook his head.  “At least the tremors have stopped.  I’ll send you word if she wakes.  Let her rest now.”

Exchanging glances, Leliana stood back to allow Cassandra room to exit the cell and then followed her out of the gaol and back towards the stairs.

“And now what do we do with her?” the Seeker asked, glaring straight ahead.  “I assume you have something in mind?”

“We need to know what she knows,” Leliana explained.  They stopped at the foot of the stairs and the Seeker looked back towards the entrance of the gaol, through which they could see Master Adan straightening and going back to his writing, the guard locking the cell door after him with an iron clang.  “I will look into the name Samson and see what else I can find out about her in the meantime.  When she is conscious again, we can interrogate her properly.”

“She was unwilling to reveal any information before,” Cassandra observed, cautiously.  “With the Mark no longer spreading, we have no leverage with which to force her cooperation this time.”

“Yes.  Time is of the essence, as you well know.  I will see to it that she cooperates,” Leliana replied, looking into the Seeker’s eyes and seeing the glimmer of understanding there as Cassandra registered her meaning.  Leliana shook her head, “The Mark on her hand is likely the key to closing the Rift permanently.  You want to see the Divine’s death avenged and so do I.  But we have a greater purpose now, one that we may not be able to complete without Trevelyan’s help.  She will help us, one way or the other.”

"You are suggesting torture."

Before the Right Hand could object further, the Left Hand continued.

“The only people who know about her crimes are us, Josephine, Cullen, and the soldiers who were there.  Everyone else - all they’ve heard is the rumor of her being pushed from the rift by Andraste.  I’ve seen to the soldiers.  They’ll be silent on the matter of the visions at the Temple.  Josephine and Cullen will wait for our decision once we have had a chance to question her.  She would say nothing before.  A Templar's will is strong - but not unbreakable.  We must be ready to use all of the tools we have at our disposal."

The Seeker's doubtful expression did not budge.  It was always the way, Leliana thought, impatiently.  The Right Hand's work was always done in the full light of day with the accompanying certitude of moral righteousness.  The shadowlands of necessity and expediency were the sole province of the Left Hand.

"She will pay for what she has done, Cassandra, but not while she is still useful.  And we must convince her to be useful.  I need to know that we are agreed on what must be done before we go any further.”

Cassandra glowered back at her for a long moment and then nodded. 

“I understand.  Within reason, I will assist you.  But, I assure you, Leliana, that I will see justice done in the end whether she is useful or not.”

With that, the Seeker turned and stalked up the stairs towards the main Chantry hall, leaving Leliana in the shadows of the cellar to contemplate how best to pull the information she needed from Trevelyan while simultaneously securing the fallen Templar’s assistance.  She knew, in her heart, that it would not be easy.  It was never easy, even with the callus of long experience to separate her from the act.  But what was the suffering of one traitor, when thousands of lives rested on the answers she could give?

 

~~0~~

 

Consciousness returned suddenly for Magna as a skin-burning splash of near-frozen water hit her face, driving the air from her lungs.  She gasped, painfully, trying to draw in a breath even as her chest spasmed to expel it back out again.  Her body overbalanced and she collapsed forward from her kneeling position onto her forearms.  Her wrists were manacled together, unable to catch her fall, and a lightning strike of pain shot through her arms and spine as her elbows impacted the solid stone.  A strangled groan escaped her lips.

She was shivering uncontrollably.  There was an ache inside of her that seemed to twist tighter and tighter with every breath. The world that she could not yet open her eyes to throbbed around her dangerously.  The metallic scrape of the shackles hurt her ears while the footsteps that circled around her sounded like the tramping of an armored battalion.  The air felt as if it were pressing in on her, rubbing painfully against her skin.

 _The lyrium horrors,_ she knew immediately as her stomach clenched with misery.  She’d experienced it once before, though this was not yet as severe as the weeks she had spent stumbling through the wilderness, half-delirious and weakened, before Samson had found her.  Her body felt leaden, her thoughts sputtered and wavered like a candle-flame in a draft - but she could still think.  The terrible, maddening need had not yet stolen her mind from her, though her memories were terribly confused. 

She had died.  She had been obliterated in an explosion of green fire.  And yet here she was, alive in this dark place.  Gritting her teeth, Magna tried to push herself back up from the stone floor, feeling abused muscles straining to work.

A hand gripped her tunic at the neck suddenly and pulled her roughly upright onto her knees.  She stifled a grunt of pain and opened her eyes.  The torchlight burned into her retinas as if she were staring into the sun, leaving illuminated trails behind that made her dull, insistent headache roar with white-hot agony for an instant. 

When the pain cleared, she could dimly make out the stone walls around her.  A dark figure moved into her field of vision between her and the torch.  The armored greaves and tabard bearing the black and white contrasted image of sword and radiant eye suddenly struck a chord of memory in Magna’s brain.  This had happened to her before.  Almost exactly.  Realizing it filled her with sudden, stomach turning dread, for she could now not be sure whether she truly was awake or if she was wrapped in some nightmare.  Or, worse, if her mind was more warped by the lyrium than she had thought and this was madness descending upon her.

“Is it over?” she croaked out as the image of the hideous Breach - like a gangrenous sore on the roof of the world - returned to her along with other scattered, fleeting memories.  

Terrified faces, people running, her left hand crackling with sinister green energy that burned her body like magefire.  Her palm flamed to life, glowing and sparking in her distress.

She remembered a woman’s dark-eyed face scowling at her, demanding that she account for all of this.  That face lowered itself before Magna again now, crouching to look her directly in the eyes. Magna could only stare back in horror, her nerves screeching shrilly as she tried to determine whether this was a cruel hallucination or reality.

_Let it be a dream.  Let me wake up back in my tent on the road with the Conclave before me and no explosion and no Seeker demanding answers._

“That depends on you,” the Seeker’s sharply accented voice rapped out, tersely, too real to be a figment of her addled brain.  “We saw the visions at the Temple.  We saw you there, in service to the monster that is the cause of all of this.  Tell me who you serve.”

The demand hit Magna like a punch to the gut, reminding her of the phantom images of herself with blade drawn at the Elder One’s side.  She could remember nothing after that, but the events of the past few weeks spread back out into her mind like a blanket of anguish.  She had failed.  She had failed the Elder One.  Worst of all, she had failed Samson.  Realizing it made her heart clench with a sense of despair more severe than the aching horror that already afflicted her.

She could not remember how or what had happened during the ritual, but clearly something had gone wrong.  This could not have been what the Elder One intended.  She looked down at the glowing sigil on her trembling palm and swallowed.  Somehow, it must have been her fault.  She could think of no other reason why she remained alive and branded with a magic so alien that it dwarfed anything she had ever seen in the mages at the Circle in Ostwick.  The others - the Wardens and the strange, foreign Venatori soldiers that had accompanied the Elder One - had perished.  As for the Elder One himself, who could say?  He was not yet a god, but he was not quite mortal either.  The thought of it, and the fate that surely awaited her if she ever came within his gaze again, filled her with gut wrenching dread.

 _You’ll do fine,_ Samson had told her, clapping her on her shoulders as she had prepared to return to Ostwick to reconnect with the Chantry and set the groundwork for her larger mission.  His weathered face had had a gleam of pride to it as he’d smiled at her.  She had been his aide and protege for most of a year by then. _I’m sending my best. Those Chantry bastards won’t know what hit them until the deed is already done._

She had sworn then in her heart that she would not disappoint him.  Samson had saved her life.  When he had found her, she had been lost - both in body and in spirit - and mired in the horrors of lyrium withdrawal, too weak to fight on and unmoored from the institutions that had governed her entire existence since childhood.  He had rescued her.  He had given her both a hand up and a new purpose to serve.  And she had failed him.

The Seeker was glaring at her, waiting, and Magna bowed her head.  She was a dead woman no matter what happened now.  Even if they didn’t execute her - and how could they not? - the lyrium sickness would carry her off raving and demented in the end.  Even if she escaped before that happened, the Elder One would destroy her for her incompetence.  The only thing that she could do now was decide how she wanted to meet her end.

 _Remember_ , she heard Samson say in her mind now, feeling again the vehemence in his words on the night that she had thrown her lot in with his Red Templars _, they used you, they discarded you, and hundreds of Templars like you.  You gave them your mind and your body, and they made you a prisoner just as much as the mages.  Never forget that.  They’re not your masters anymore._

“No,” she replied, hoarsely, into the silence of the chamber. 

She owed the Chantry nothing now.  There was no Maker.  There was no Andraste looking down from the Fade.  She didn’t know what awaited her beyond death or whether or not the Elder One would have mercy on her soul when he had achieved his godhood, but her last act in this life would not be to betray Samson and her Red brethren.  Of that much she was resolved.

The Seeker’s expression creased into a scowl, her voice turning contemptuous. 

“Hundreds died at the Conclave.  Thousands more will die due to the chaos you have helped create.  And even now, when you have seen this with your own eyes, you will refuse to help end it?”

But Magna had said all that she was willing to say.  She closed her eyes, calling upon all of her reserves of will as she tried to focus her mind and turn it once more into the fortress that her training had made it.  Everything she had believed in as a Templar may have been wrong, but the discipline was hers still.  Without the lyrium in her blood to quell the hunger, it was difficult, but she would try anyway.  Whatever happened, she would bear it in silence.  It was the best she could do now.

“You were a Templar once.  You swore oaths to protect the innocent.  You swore oaths to defend the faithful from the dangers of magic,” the Seeker accused, severely.

Magna withheld a gasp as the woman snatched the front of her tunic, dragging her back upright from where she had bowed.  She could feel the Seeker’s face close to hers, the heat of the other woman's skin - blushing with anger - inches from Magna’s own, but she kept her eyes firmly shut as the grip moved to her throat and tightened.

“If that means nothing to you now, then tell me, at least, what has taken the place of justice and peace in your corrupted mind?  If not who, then _what_ do you serve?  What do you value so highly that it is worth the blood of thousands?”

 _Hear my cry, guide me through the blackest nights,_ Magna recited in her mind, beginning the ancient meditative prayer as her breath constricted.

They were the words of Andraste, who was not the Bride of the Maker but only a woman long dead, but they were the words she knew by heart.  She had recited them every day from childhood through the years of her training as she learned to quiet her mind and steel her will in order to bear the trials of Templar life. Though she no longer believed in the Maker, the words had not left her and she knew no others.  And so she let the familiar ritual carry her through, beginning the process of divorcing her mind from the pains of the body.

_Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked._

“Cassandra,” another feminine voice warned, this one fluid and Orlesian. 

The grip on her throat held, squeezing tighter for an instant, and then Magna felt it release.  Her body choked for breath reflexively, but her mind remained steady. 

_Make me to rest in the warmest places._

There was movement around her, the brief conferring of voices, but she was beyond that now.  Though she could feel the ache and tremble of her limbs, the prickling of her skin, and the rapid patter of her heart, she was beginning to drift outside of it.  The pounding in her temples began to slow and fade. 

_See me kneel.  For I walk only where you would bid me._

“Let’s try this again,” the Orlesian voice continued from nearby after a moment of silence.  Its tone was warm, unconcerned, and unemotional.

_Stand only in places that you have blessed._

Warm skin touched her hands briefly. Strong arms gripped her under each arm, lifting her to her feet and raising her bound wrists above her head, fastening them to what felt like a chain.  A pang of fear momentarily seized Magna’s belly, as she realized what was about to happen to her, but she forced it down - forced her mind back to the soothing familiarity of the verses. 

_Sing only the words that you place in my throat._

“I have been keeping an eye on your recovery while you have been asleep,” the Orlesian continued, moving about the room.  It was impossible to tell the exact direction that the words came from as the sound echoed on the stones.  “I know that you are disoriented.  You are afraid.  It will have been some time since your last dose of lyrium.  I know that you are in pain.”

 _Know my heart,_ Magna forced out in her mind, though these words came harder and with greater effort.  The voice’s soft assurance cut through into her thoughts in a way that the Seeker’s barrage had not.  The mention of her pain made it suddenly real again as she struggled to leave it behind.

“There is no need for all of this unpleasantness.  I have a few simple questions and then you can go back to your cell.  You will be given food and enough lyrium to make you comfortable.  You can rest.  It will all be over.”

Magna felt her insides twist sharply within her as the cruel possibility of relief was presented.  Sweat was already dripping down her arms and down her chest and back under her tunic.  Her body felt inflamed. 

 _Take me from a life of sorrow_ , she intoned, her parched lips moving to physically shaping the words so that they could emit no others and betray her.

“I want to know about this Elder One,” her tormenter told her, reasonably.  The woman was close to her now, the voice emanating from a place near her right ear, it’s fluid syllables soft and unthreatening while still sending a chill through Magna’s bones.  “That is an easy question.  If you regard him so highly, then you will surely wish to brag of his accomplishments.  Who is he?”

 _Judge me worthy of your endless pride_. 

Magna kept silent.  She would be worthy.  Even in these last hours - especially in her last hours - she would be worthy of the second chance she had been given.  Her eyes closed tighter.  Her lips shaped the next words - _judge me whole -_ and she hoped in the way only the condemned can that it would be true and she would be judged for her steadfast loyalty as much as her failures.

A hand wrapped around her hair, pulling her head firmly back as something - a thick strap, she thought - was slipped around her neck.  Panic suffused her, scrabbling against the underside of Magna’s skin as she felt the strap tighten, but she forced herself to remain still.  Iron tines dug cruelly into the underside of her chin and the top of her breastbone, cold and unforgiving.  Her chin was stretched upward at an angle that made it more difficult to breathe, and she could not lower it without putting painful pressure on the prongs.

“The Heretic’s Fork,” the smooth voice explained without either malice or sympathy. “Fitting for a woman who has betrayed her sacred vows and murdered the Most Holy.”

 _Find me well within your grace_. 

This was only the beginning, Magna knew.  Stories of what the Seekers did to wayward Templars had been legendary in the Order.  She felt a trickle of blood begin to slide down her throat as the sharp points of the fork pressed and scratched against her skin.  Blossoms of pain radiated from the corresponding points on her chest, magnified by her already distressed body.

“There is still time to walk away from this,” the torturer soothed at her, as other hands began to cut away her tunic, baring her to the waist.  Her cheek flinched, her eyes opening automatically as she felt a blistering heat appear a mere inches from her face.  Her eyes took in the terror of a red-hot point of iron so close to her cheek that she could barely see its tip in the edge of her vision.  Blue eyes in a woman’s lovely face watched her with preternatural calm from behind the brand’s glowing threat.  The woman smiled. “A few words will suffice.  Who can they hurt now?  But withholding them will hurt you.  I can assure you that.”

 _Touch me with fire that I may be cleansed_ , Magna continued, closing her eyes tightly and gritting her teeth in preparation for what she knew was coming. 

An instant later, she felt the scorching pain of the burning iron as it grazed the flesh of her left shoulder blade and clamped her teeth shut immediately to cut off her strangled cry.  Her lungs heaved, unable to draw enough breath through her nose and constricted throat, unable to open her mouth without pain from the fork.  Her body tried to twist away reflexively, but she could get no purchase either to move forward or back.  They had raised the chain enough that she was stretched now just beyond her full height, her weight uncomfortably on her wrists and shoulders, making it harder to maintain the extension of her neck forced by the fork.  The trickle of blood that had begun to pool the hollow of her throat was joined by a second slow rivulet.

“What of Samson then?  What would he think, to see you like this?”

 _Tell me I have sung to your approval_. 

Tears sprung to her eyes as she struggled to lift herself up on the pads of her bare feet enough to fill her lungs with air and take the pressure off her neck and shoulders.  Samson would honor her sacrifice.  He would avenge her.  He would take this as evidence of what he already knew to be true - the callous disregard of the Chantry for its once-faithful Templars.  In suffering this, in dying well, she would perhaps earn his forgiveness. 

The next touch of the iron was worse, the full length of the brand rather than merely the tip.  It pressed mercilessly to the small of her back, overwhelming all other thoughts and ripping a bellow of pain from her throat.  The fork worked its way deeper under her skin, the blood welling up from the wounds in earnest now.  Her body arched and writhed and clenched, unable to avoid the torment.  Her lungs felt as if they might burst.  The smell of her own seared flesh reached her and her stomach heaved, bile rising into her throat.

 _Hear my cry_. 

Sobbing for breath,she no longer cared to whom the prayer rose, if to anyone. Her legs and knees were weakening beneath her, tiring as she strained to draw breath and hold herself up, her shoulders feeling as if they were being pulled apart.  Her chest was now covered with her own blood, the coppery smell filling her nose.

“You can stop this,” the Orlesian told her dispassionately, as the brand was applied once again to her back, longer this time, dredging another torturous roar from the bottom of Magna’s lungs and embedding the fork solidly into the thin flesh over her collar bone. “There is still time to make this right.  All you have to do is tell me why you were at the Conclave.  What purpose would sacrificing the Divine have served?”

As the torture continued, Magna was dimly aware that the edges of her vision were beginning to close in and whiten.  The muscles of her neck and shoulders no longer had the power to hold her chin up.  The fork rested against bone, her neck still extended at a painful angle but every breath now sending a wracking ache through her clavicles, shoulder, and sternum.  It seemed to be happening to someone else.  She seemed to float outside of herself, watching, as the irons were heated, applied, removed, and heated again.  The anguished cries, the tears, the blood, the knees collapsing under her and throwing her full weight onto raw and bleeding wrists - they were all hers.  The body that was suffering was hers.  But her mind had retreated somewhere else.

Time seemed to lose its meaning.  The individual burns, the voices, the questions bled into each other and Magna felt as if she were slowly slipping under water, the surface of an ocean of pain and sorrow closing over her head and pulling her down and down. 

 _Seat me by your side in death,_ she thought, letting the words comfort her. 

Her thoughts were becoming muddled, her ability to remember the chant confused.  What little energy she had had to resist the pain was now depleted.  Her body gave up the fight at last, hanging limply, the strap around her neck choking tighter and finally cutting off her breath.  Her heart pounded in her ears, her lungs burned, but she could not stop it.  She waited, as the darkness crept up around her and pulled her into its embrace.

It took Magna a moment to realize that the torture had stopped.  Hands pulled her up, and the strap that had bound the heretic’s fork in place loosened, allowing her to breathe again. Her body drew in the cold air of the dungeon with an agonized whoop.  She could summon no sound, either of relief or pain as her head was tipped further back and the heretic’s fork was removed, though the tines had sunk into her flesh up to their hilts and hurt abominably as they were drawn out.  Her head sagged forward on her injured neck.  She no longer had the strength to lift it.

“Your devotion to your cause is impressive,” the woman told her.  Magna’s eyes opened, glazed and unfocused, and she made out the outline of the same pale face, blue eyes and red hair she had seen before.  “Why did you stray?  What was it that turned you away from the Maker?  Will you tell me that, at least?”

Magna let the silence bathe her again.  She could not have replied if she had wanted to.  How could you describe betrayal so complete that it wiped away everything that you had thought true in the whole of your life?  Though her lungs could draw air again, her heart was still gradually slowing.  With the blood she had lost, she truly might be dying now.  Her body welcomed it.  Her mind could no longer summon the fear of oblivion and punishment and welcomed it, too. 

The Seeker reappeared, her expression severe and solemn.  One of the soldiers who held her lifted Magna’s abused and bloodied chin back, and she did not resist.  If they cut her throat, it would be relief at this point.  If there was more pain to be inflicted, she would bear that, too, until it was over.  She no longer cared.

Her mouth was opened and the bitter and achingly familiar taste of a lyrium philter reached her tongue.  Moments later, the relief hit her like rain on the sands of a dry desert, and within a few seconds more, she realized that something was wrong.  The lyrium was too strong, far more concentrated than either the working dose she had been given when hunting maleficar in the wildlands of the Marches or the potent drafts that the Red Templars had used.  It flooded her body, relieving the hurt of the hunger, dulling the pain of her injuries, suffusing her with power and blue light where there had been only suffering and darkness, but it confused and agitated her, too.  Her heart thundered again with its rush like a cavalry charge. 

 _Why this?_ , she wondered, her thoughts struggling through the addling effects of the torture and the lyrium.  _Why now?_

The Seeker had drawn back a few paces, but her gaze had remained steadfastly on Magna.  The Orlesian torturer returned to stand next the the Seeker, the hands that had wracked Magna with agony minutes before now folded carefully across the woman’s chainmail hauberk.

“I give you one last chance, Ser Trevelyan,” the Seeker told her, harshly, but there was something else in her voice.  Regret?  Resignation?  Magna could not summon the energy to puzzle it out.  She waited.  “Tell us what you know of the Divine's murder, of the Conclave.  Help us end the crisis of the Breach.  I cannot promise you mercy before whatever court tries you.  But I give you this chance to save your soul by saving others.  Redeem yourself here at the last.  Help us.”

Somewhere, Magna knew, Samson was regrouping, planning, and finding a way through this unexpected accident.  Word would have gotten to him by now.  She wondered if he knew she was alive, if that part of the story had been spread or if he assumed her dead along with the others. She wondered if the others, the men and women who had become her family in this last year, would mourn her loss.  They would, just as she would have mourned them.  Samson would.  She barely remembered her own family, whom she had seen but seldom since she had been sent to the Chantry for education and training in early childhood.  Her parents had been veritable strangers to her when she had returned to Ostwick.  The Red Templars were her family now.  In the span of a year, Samson had been more father to her than her own had ever been.

 _Let him think me already dead_ , she thought as she exerted the very last of her will - fed by the rush of the lyrium - to slowly stand, forcing her feet to support her.  She looked full into the Seeker’s gaze as much as the blood and sweat that was running into her eyes would allow her to.  _Let him think it was painless and quick.  Let his secrets die with me, so that my brothers and sisters in arms will prevail.  Let me die standing, a true Templar and not a slave._

“No,” she declared into the stale air of the dungeon. 

The pain that hit her next was instantaneous and complete.  The Seeker’s body began to crackle with blue energy, haloing her like the fiery corona of an eclipse.  Magna felt her body explode with agony, muscles jerked rigid, her bones seeming to try and pull themselves apart.  The lyrium in her blood, once sweet relief, became a literal fire in her veins, burning her from within and overwhelming sight, sound, and feeling.  She felt as if all the power of the blast, all the death and suffering that had been inflicted by the explosion at the Temple, were focused on a place in the core of her being in one single moment.  Her mouth opened in a screaming rictus from which no sound could escape, and the blackness of the Void snapped closed around Magna at last.

 

~~0~~

 

“Maker’s breath, not again,” Master Adan swore, crossly, slamming his notebook shut as Cullen approached the entrance to the gaol.  “Three days I spent putting her back together last time, only for you to come down here and burn her half to death.  I’m not doing it again.  I -”

The alchemist stopped mid-tirade as he looked up into Cullen’s face, his bushy black brows arching in surprise.  His arm had been about to stab meaningfully in Cullen’s direction, but it dropped to his side.

“Oh.  Commander.  I thought you were the Sister.”

“Can’t say I get that often,” Cullen replied, attempting humor to try to put the man at ease, though there was nothing about the situation that was humorous. Tensions were running high all over Haven.  Outbursts of all kinds were becoming common, and he couldn’t fault the alchemist for this particular grievance. “But I’m glad not to be if that’s what’s in store for her.”

In truth, he was angry, too.  He hadn’t believed the rumor that was going around among his contingent of ex-Templars.  Leliana had used her people for the interrogation detail, but screams had been heard from the cells and there was all sorts of wild speculation going on about the woman beneath the Chantry.  He wanted to trust his compatriots, but a nagging concern had prompted Cullen to seek out the guard that had stood outside of the prison chamber and then the full story had come out.  The account that the man gave - of the torture, of Trevelyan’s resistance, of Cassandra using her Seeker’s gift to set the lyrium in the prisoner’s blood aflame - had sickened him.

"Do you have any idea what you’ve done?  What moral authority can we have if we stoop to torture?" he had railed at Cassandra and Leliana in the council chamber that evening, stalking before the war table.  The Seeker had stood by, seething but silent, in the face of his impassioned harangue.  The ambassador, Josephine, remained quiet on the sidelines with a serious expression, but she, too, was clearly troubled.

"What choice do we have?" Leliana had shot back, defensively.  "We have no leads to pursue.  If she will not cooperate, how can we move forward?"

He had wanted to shake her then, to make her see the damage she had inflicted - not just on the one person who might be able to stop the Breach, but on the morale of the troops who would surely hear about this. 

The Chantry’s abuse of the Templar’s dependency on lyrium was one of the touchstones that had caused so many to turn from the Order and the Chantry to begin with.  To use that as a method of torture - to deny lyrium until the hunger was strong, then give relief from the devouring need just to use it as yet another method of inflicting pain - was both heinous and stupid.  It could have killed Trevelyan outright in her weakened state.  If the torture had not broken the woman’s mind entirely, she would certainly never trust the Chantry or anyone associated with it again.  The interrogation had yielded no information, besides.  It had been useless, as torture so often was.  In the end, at his vehement insistence, Leliana and Cassandra had agreed that this would never be repeated.  The prisoner would be treated humanely, whatever her crimes.  They would find another way.

Cullen glanced from Adan to the occupied cell at the back of the prison chamber.  Crouched against the back wall in the shadows, he could make out the form of a woman, kneeling, her head bowed as if in prayer or meditation.  The image of it brought back an unpleasant flash in his mind - the Ferelden Circle, himself as a young Templar kneeling in a cage of magical energy, praying for mercy or death or anything to save him from the ravages that had been inflicted upon his mind.  He suppressed a shudder and turned back to Adan.

“Is there any permanent damage?”

“You mean aside from the magical Mark on her hand that could kill her at any moment for all I know?” Adan replied, gruffly, but he shrugged.  “No.  She’ll have the scars as a reminder, but nothing serious.”  His expression darkened.  “Nothing physical anyway.”

Cullen winced.  _The worst scars never are physical_ , he thought. 

“I’ll speak with her.  If she’s stable, you can go about your other duties.  We can take it from here.”

The alchemist eyed him cautiously.  “I mean it, Commander.  I’m not going to keep patching her up just so the Sister and Seeker Cassandra can knock her back down.  I’m no bleeding heart healer, but even I’ve got limits.  It isn’t right.”

“Believe me, I know,” Cullen agreed, looking the man in the eyes.  “It won’t happen again.  I intend to see to that.”

Satisfied, Adan returned the nod curtly and gathered his kit and books, trudging out of the gaol as if he couldn’t wait to be back up in the sunlight again.  Cullen waited until he was gone and then glanced at the guard who was on duty.

“A moment alone,” he told the soldier, who did not hesitate before saluting and walking outside the chamber.

Trevelyan had not moved since he had first seen her.  She was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, her back bent, her head bowed, hands resting palm up in her lap as if in defeated supplication.  The mark was quiescent on her left hand, but it still glowed a faint green in the darkness of the cell  A curtain of dark honey-colored hair obscured her face.  She did not look up or give any indication that she had heard him approach.  Someone had put clean clothes on her, at least, Cullen obseved.  A wooden plate with a half loaf of bread and a cup of water sat untouched on the stone floor.

It was a pitiful sight, despite what she had done.  He had seen Trevelyan once before in the valley below the Temple.  She had been with Cassandra, Varric, and the apostate Solas as they forged their way towards the Breach.  Still wearing the armor of the Order, she had fought admirably and without reservation at the Seeker’s side.  He had found that curious for a heretic, and had held out hope briefly that it was all a mistake - that she was not the one responsible for the catastrophe.  Trevelyan had been silent as he had paused to confer with Cassandra, but she had met his gaze briefly, her green eyes tired and stoic and sad.  He had been struck by how young she seemed - a little younger than he had been at the time of Uldred’s Rebellion at the Ferelden Circle.  He had hoped, then, that she would survive and clear her name.  His prayer had only partially been answered.  She was alive, but it was a broken woman that he looked at now.  Though her guilt was established, he could not help but feel sorry for her.

“My name is Ser Cullen Rutherford,” he told her, drawing up Adan's stool to sit closer to the bars of her cell.  “We met briefly, but I don’t know how much you might remember of that day.”

Trevelyan remained absolutely still and silent.  He might as well have been talking to a statue.  Cullen had expected as much, however.  He forged on.

“I won’t blame you if you choose not to speak to me,” he assured her, making an effort to keep his tone polite and non-threatening.  “I wanted to come and see for myself that you were recovering after your ordeal.”

There were so many questions he wanted to ask her.  How had she come to this?  What cause did she serve that she was prepared to die for it?  Why had she willingly gone to the Breach to try and end it if she was part of its cause to begin with?  But he knew, having been in her place, that asking would only make her retreat further in.  It would compound the damage, and they could not afford that now.

Leliana had given him the dossier she had prepared on Trevelyan.  She had been scarcely five years old when her family had sent her to a Chantry school and promised her for Templar training.  In all her years as a recruit, there had never been so much as a complaint against her.  She had, in fact, received commendations from her superiors for her bravery and dedication.  She had been hunting maleficar when the rebellion had occurred - a job not entrusted lightly.  There had been half a dozen Templars on that detachment and she was the only one known to have survived.  That had been more than a year ago now.  What had happened in the intervening time was anyone’s guess.

Better than most, Cullen understood why she might have defected to some other cause.  He had left the Order himself and come here to the Inquisition, but what had been out there waiting for her when her faith had failed?  That was the real question.  They might never know now.  Perhaps it was beside the point anyway.  Whoever she was protecting, she was clearly willing to suffer greatly and die to do so, and he knew better than any of the others how difficult it was to break a Templar's resolve.  Going up against that level of loyalty or fear directly would never work.  But it might work in their favor, too, if it could be channeled to their ends.

“I was a Templar like you not long ago,” Cullen told her, feeling out the words as he said them. 

He had gone over and over in his mind what he could say that Trevelyan might respond to.  Cassandra had railed at her, tried to arouse her sense of fear and shame.  Leliana had tortured her.  The only thing left to do was appeal to her conscience.  She would not have agreed to help at the Temple if there was not a part of her that was horrified by the destruction that surrounded them.  And so the words that would reach her in her mental hell had to come from his heart.  He abandoned his speeches, shaking his head.  

“I can’t know what happened to you to bring you here.  I don’t expect you to tell me.   But I hope that you will listen to what I have to say.”

It could have been his imagination, but Cullen thought he glimpsed just the briefest movement of Trevelyan’s hands.  He could feel her listening, though she said nothing, and that bolstered his resolve.

“Outside of these walls, there is chaos.  People are dying.  Mages, Templars, nobles, commonfolk, all alike.  We receive reports daily of rifts to the Fade opening in towns and farmland.  Demons pouring out.  You know, as I do, what that means.”  He shook his head, frowning as he searched for the words.  “Whatever you think of the Chantry, whatever you think of the Order – and whatever you have come to think of us – I will not believe that this is what you want.  I think you understand that what is happening out there is wrong.  An accident.  A mistake.  If the master you serve is worthy of your loyalty, he would not make you a party to this willingly.”

With a deep breath, he gathered himself for the final push.

“You alone seem to have the power to close the rifts.  We cannot do it without you.  And so all that _I_ ask of you, _Ser_ Magna, is that you help us close the rifts before more innocent people die.  Nothing else is more important than that.”

For a long breathless moment, Cullen waited.  Just when he was sure that she was too far gone, his heart sinking in disappointment, she stirred.  Her head lifted, her hair falling back from her face.  He could see two ugly scars on her throat beneath her chin, imperfectly healed though Adan had done his best.  Green eyes met his, and he felt his heart ache for what he saw there.  There was suffering, fear, exhaustion, and perhaps the very edge of madness – but there was a deep sadness as well and an abiding shame.

“Will you help us?” he asked, pressing her for an answer now that he knew he had her attention.  She stared at him for a moment, and then exhaled deeply.

“I will help you close the rifts,” she told him, slowly, as if uncertain that her voice still worked. “I will try to save what lives I can.  I will not betray those that sent me here.  I will answer no questions.”

“That is enough,” Cullen replied, nodding solemnly, though mentally he sent his relieved thanks up to the Maker.  “I will speak with the others and we will make arrangements for your release.  You have my word that you will be treated fairly.  Thank you.”

She nodded before bowing her head once more, and Cullen saw her Marked hand squeeze closed tightly as he rose to leave. 

 _Welcome to the Inquisition_ , he thought as he turned to exit the prison, heading immediately to the council chamber, _Herald of Andraste._

 


	2. Friends and Enemies

_**A year ago, near the Nahashin Marshes of Orlais . . .** _

There was always a damp humidity in the air near the marshes, even up in the hills, and so the rain felt like an unnecessary insult. It splattered down the tent canvases and soaked through the gambesons of the templars on guard duty. It pooled in the shallow hollows of the ground and turned the dirt and decaying leaves to thick mud under the feet. Work continued on, the templars either impervious or oblivious to the rain and mud. Some clustered around the few fires that could be kept going under canvas awnings in the wet, their oily, reddened eyes staring into the flames as they talked among themselves. Samson watched them all from his command tent and pondered.

He couldn't have been prouder of them - his templars - if they had been his own children. They were tough, every man and woman of them. The red lyrium had made them strong, but it was more than that. Hearts of solid steel beat in those breasts - loyal and determined beyond anything any Chantry Mother would ever understand. They never shirked. They worked together seamlessly, like family. Most of them had left the only lives they knew behind them.  Though, many had had little enough to leave behind to begin with with the Order splintered and collapsing. So, they had only each other now. And, of course, they had him.

Samson had made them what they were. He would lead them to a future that was, if not bright, then at least less of an insult to their worth. In that respect, perhaps his templars were close enough to being his children - the only sons and daughters he would ever have. He allowed himself a brief smile at the thought.

Maddox' hammer rang steadily from the smithy tent, adding to the droning cadence of the rain. Plans for the armor were steadily growing under his clever fingers. The Order waited to be claimed, but it would be awhile yet before the remaining templars were ready for him. The work would begin in earnest then. In the meantime, there were logistics, training, strategies to turn over in his mind. And, he thought, glancing up as the muddy splash of footsteps reached his ears, there was recruitment to consider, too.

A young templar - Tomas, Samson remembered - approached the tent and saluted respectfully before turning his solemn red-cast eyes up to meet Samson's own. He was a quiet lad.  Orlesian, but from some backwater village that had been lucky to produce enough wheat and barley to scrape by each year let alone a boy who could eventually become a templar. Samson acknowledged him a familiar nod and the same camaraderie he showed all of his men. Even the ones who had been changed.

"Mend sent me to tell you that the new one's awake, ser," Tomas reported, dutifully.

"Well, about time," Samson replied, grunting as he rose from his camp stool. He winked at the youth. "Women and their beauty sleep, eh?"

The younger templar colored briefly, his cheeks reddening to match the faint blood-bruise tint around his eyes. Aside from the handful of female templars, no doubt the young man had had little experience with women. The Order discouraged such things. Samson remembered what it was to be that age, when a fair pair of eyes could leave him tongue-tied and stumbling. He grinned.

"I'll see to her. Go on about your duties."

Tomas saluted again, turned, and trudged back out into the wet. Drawing an oilskin cloak around himself, Samson followed.

He had found the girl while out with a patrol the day before near the edge of the marsh. A strangled groan had caught their attention from a tangled thicket and investigation had revealed a young woman in templar armor propped up among a shallow alcove of roots, quaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm.

She had been far gone in the shakes - her eyes terrified as they had approached her, her lips muttering some frightened nonsense about blood mages while her hands grasped reflexively for a sword and shield that she no longer seemed to possess. The endurance she needed to fight or resist was already exhausted, though, as Samson had checked her over. There had been dried blood on her armor and her cheeks had had the sunken look of someone who hadn't seen a decent meal for awhile, but the shivering tremors in her limbs and the sweat on her face despite the chilly damp had told him everything he needed to know about what was wrong with her.

In the end, Samson had decided to bring her back to camp and see what the healer could do for her. Whatever had happened, she deserved better than a slow death in the swamp. Mercifully, the woman had passed into unconsciousness along the way, but she was awake now and no doubt confused. So, it was time to find out what her story was and whether she was to be a convert or a sad casualty. Either way, he'd take care of it himself.

The grim, sallow-skinned apostate that acted as the camp's primary healer and field surgeon glanced up from her herbal preparations as Samson approached her tent. The witch had initially been reluctant to take up with a band of templars, but the world was an even more dangerous place for mages these days and circumstances had changed her mind. Maddox' presence among their number and the way the others treated the Tranquil mage had calmed her in time. Since she refused to name herself, the templars had taken to referring to her as Mother Mend and that seemed to suit the aged apostate well enough.

"You sit tight, duckie. Drink that tea," she crooned at someone else in the tent, her harsh voice crackling, as she stood and stepped out under the awning and into the damp air. The woman's face was deeply lined and weathered, but her dark brown eyes were as sharp as raven talons. She looked old enough to be a grandmother, but it was hard to tell. Samson had seen whores in Darktown younger than himself who had looked older than Mother Mend.

"Found a likely one this time, didn't you?" the healer commented, with a ghastly smile. "All pleases and thank-yous now that she's back in her wits. Pretty highborn accent."

"Damaged?" Samson asked and the crone shook her head, sniffing.

"No more than the rest of you. Nothing Mother Mend couldn't sort out. Gave her food and a little of the blue to chase the horrors away." The apostate raised a thin, grey eyebrow. "Or should I start feeding her the red instead?"

"Let's see if she's for it first," he replied, evenly, and moved past the old woman and ducked through the open tent flap. Mend had proved eminently useful, and she'd chortled at the idea of possession or blood magic - _isn't_ _enough blood in these old veins to spare_ , she'd replied - but the witch was unsettling all the same.

The girl was sitting up on a pallet at the back of the tent next to Mend's charcoal brazier, a steaming clay cup of a some medicinal-smelling liquid clasped between her hands. Her blonde hair was still tangled, limp, and dirty, but there was some color back in her thin cheeks and she was no longer shivering. She looked to be about twenty - not long past her vigil, no doubt - with a lovely face that had likely broken more than one heart back at whatever post she'd come from.

She looked up at Samson as he entered and he saw her eyes widen briefly in alarm before she caught herself and directed her gaze aside quickly.

 _Am I that much changed?_  he thought, careful to keep his lip from curling sullenly at her reaction to his face. Life on the streets of Kirkwall had been harsh. The toll it had taken on his body had been secondary to the ravages on the inside, and he'd given them little thought.  He knew that his cheeks and eyes were hollowed, his teeth grey and gaped from years of fighting and a diet of stolen scraps.  The red lyrium only added to the fearsome ugliness of his visage, Samson knew, but what did it matter, when it gave him power and strength and purpose? He had thought himself long past the point of caring about such things, and yet that instant of aversion on a pretty face brought the sting of what had been lost through all of these years back to him.

Still, he was here with a purpose. Samson hunkered down to look at his guest eye to eye. She was nervous already and it would put her more at ease if he were not towering over her.

"Name's Samson. And you are?"

The girl's fingers gripped her cup tighter, but after an instant's hesitation she looked up at him and he was better pleased to note that she met his gaze fully and did not flinch this time. Her eyes were dark green, gold flecked around the iris, and large. A series of shallow scratches marred her left cheek, but she seemed unaware of them. There was a conflicted quality to her expression, as if she were simultaneously relieved and troubled by his arrival.

"Ser Magna Trevelyan of the Ostwick Circle," she replied, politely enough. She had the plummy accent of a Marcher noble, but there was none of the attitude Samson had come to expect from that class in her tone. A polite one by habit this girl, as Mend had said. Before he could speak, she continued, her brow creasing in bemusement. "Forgive me, serah, but may I ask - are you well? Your eyes . . ."

A fair question, but the delivery amused Samson. She inquired delicately as if afraid of giving offense, where an older knight with more years behind her shield would have remained on her guard.  _Wet behind the ears_ , he thought.  _Too honest._  The Chantry's sheltered upbringing at work, no doubt. But the genuine concern in her voice was vaguely touching, even so. He allowed his lips to twist into a smile.

"I'm not the one to be worried about. You're the one we pulled out of the bog," he told her, skirting the question. Because he suspected that it would calm her nerves, he added, "I was Kirkwall Circle myself. Look's like we're both a long way from home."

The gambit worked. Samson saw Trevelyan's shoulder's relax just a fraction. Comfortable with other templars, then. Not a bad sign. She nodded, and then he saw the furrowing of her brow, the inward turn of her gaze as she remembered something troubling.

"Where's your detachment? They didn't send a fresh shield like you out here alone, I bet," Samson pushed, when it seemed unlikely that she would pick up the conversation on her own.

The girl glanced away, chagrined. "Is it that obvious?"

Was that shame in her expression? Fear? There was an unpleasant story in that head waiting to be told. One she clearly did not want to tell, but he needed to get it out of her before a decision could be made.

"Listen," he told her, authoritatively. She look at him reluctantly, and he raised an eyebrow in a friendly expression. "Remember how I said I was Kirkwall? You know what happened there. Everyone does. There's nothing you can say that'll surprise me. You could've skinned half your patrol alive and made a cloak out of them and it wouldn't touch what I've seen. So, might as well spit it out. What happened?"

This got her attention. She eyed him for a moment, considering, and then asked, "You  _were_  Kirkwall Circle. You left the Order?"

A loaded question, in more ways than one. He'd been kicked out the first time. The second time - there hadn't been an Order left to stay with in Kirkwall after the horror at the Gallows.

"The Order left me," Samson replied gruffly, unable to keep the hard hint of old anger out of his voice. Her expression did not budge at this knowledge, and he continued, "We're still templars here. Just not on the Chantry's leash anymore. Good thing for you, too. I get the feeling whatever happened isn't something you're anxious to confess to a Chantry Mother."

"I didn't -" Trevelyan began reflexively and then stopped herself. Her head dropped and she sighed, a long exhale of aggrieved frustration. She shook her head. "They're dead. I didn't do it, but I couldn't stop it either."

She cursed under her breath, reaching up and running her free hand over her face and pressing her fist against her lips hard. Samson watched, passively. There was a part of him that wanted to reach out to comfort her, but the commander in him kept his body still. He waited as she collected herself.

"We were tracking a group of apostates that had escaped while being transferred to the Ostwick Circle. Maleficar, they told us. Blood magic. When we found them, they were hiding in the marshes. They were terrified of us. They surrendered. Captain Selwyn said it was too late for that - and that's what turned them. First one and then another and then every one of them. Abominations."

Her recollection was shot through with dread. Samson could imagine what it had been like, remembering the first time he'd seen one of the possessed terrors rise up from where a mage had fallen.

"We lost Ginter and Marsham in the fight," Trevelyan continued, her eyes unfocused to the middle distance now, remembering. "Brendan - he recognized one of the women. She'd grown up in the same village as him before the Circle. It snapped something, seeing her like that. There was an argument later that night. The next thing I know, Brendan and Selwyn had drawn steel on each other and Selwyn took a sword in the throat before I could get between them."

There were tears in the corners of her eyes when she could find her voice again. "Brendan took the supplies, said I could stay and take my chances or go with him. I couldn't leave the captain there alone, choking to death on his own blood, so I stayed. Brendan left and Selwyn died the next morning. I buried him and then tried to find my way out, but I couldn't find the road. I don't remember much after that."

"You're lucky we were passing. You were deep in the shakes by the time we found you. A few more days, and we'd be burying you, too," Samson observed, considering. He had no doubt that she was telling the truth. It wasn't the worst story he'd heard of a hunting expedition gone wrong, and there was no faking the haunted grief in her face. "But, you're alive. What are you going to do about it?"

"They'll never believe me," Trevelyan replied, hollowly. Her expression crumpled as the truth of the words hit her. "Six templars go out, five veterans die or go mad, and it's the new shield that survives to tell the tale? They'll call an inquest. The Seekers will get involved. They'll start wondering if a blood mage got its claws in my head. There's nothing but my word to say otherwise. I'm finished."

She was right, Samson knew. Templars had been dismissed for much less and a Circle templar under the thrall of a blood mage could do a lot of damage. Even if they didn't drum the girl out of the Order, her career was certainly over. She'd never be trusted with anything more complicated than guard duty again - and then only with another templar present. If they did "retire" her, she'd likely spend the rest of her life aching for the philter. His blood pounded, remembering, his veins constricting with the memory of the need.

 _What a sodding waste_ , he thought, his heart falling as he imagined the girl in front of him as just another one of the faces he'd seen on the streets of Darktown, broken, hopeless, and filled with a hunger that could never quite be sated. He made a decision.

"You're not finished," he told her. She glanced up at the certainty in his tone. Samson continued, gesturing out of the tent flap, where the rain was still pattering down. "There's a camp full of men and women like you out there. Templars abandoned, betrayed by the Chantry. They don't need a Revered Mother or a sodding Divine who doesn't know what it's like to bring down a sword on a frightened mage to yank their chains as if they were trained dogs. We joined the Order to protect people - even the mages. The Chantry doesn't give two shits about either the mages or us. So fuck 'em. We're better off without them."

Trevelyan listened, silent, her tea growing cold and forgotten in her hands. Her eyes were wide, but she was turning his words over in her mind. There was doubt there, but there was a sort of recognition, too. This wasn't the first time she'd thought along those lines, maybe. Or maybe she'd just never heard those thoughts spoken aloud before now. Either way, she did not dispute him. Time to bring the point home.

"So, you can slink back to Ostwick like a good dog and hope they believe you. You can try to find somewhere to lay low and forget you were ever a templar - but the shakes will get you in the end unless you can find a way to feed them. Not a pretty way to go," Samson told her, "Or, you can stay here. There's no one here to hold you hostage by your philter. No one to treat you like a walking suit of armor to be used and discarded once you're damaged. Just templars trying to put all this back together in a way that makes sense."

For a moment, there was only the sound of the rain on the canvas above their heads. Trevelyan seemed frozen, her expression falling by degrees as she tried to reconcile - as they had all had to at some point or other - what it was to be wrong about the very thing you had dedicated your life to.

"Maker have mercy," she breathed at last, flatly, but the doubt had already taken root. Samson could see it. He shook his head.

"If there ever was a Maker, he's gone. You might as well ask the moon," he told her, and saw her flinch guiltily. "But you already knew that, didn't you?"

He hefted himself up with a grunt, looking down at the girl as she stared into her cup, despondent. She was already three-quarters won over. He knew how this went. He'd seen it often enough of late. She was loyal - she'd stayed behind to comfort her dying captain instead of saving her own neck, after all - but she knew he was right, and there was doubt and fear enough already in her heart to bring her around. All she needed was the push, and the assurance that it was the right path - just like all the others.

Before this time tomorrow,Trevelyan would be out there with the rest, pledging her steel with theirs. In time, she would be one more member of his red-eyed army. If she was unlucky, she would become one of the hulking, red crystal-riddled horrors that lurked in the wooded camp nearby. The thought of it - of looking into those green eyes, grown red and blank in an increasingly monstrous face - caught and twisted something inside of him he'd thought long blackened and discarded.

"I can tell you're one of the good ones. Better than they deserve," he told her, more gently, standing over her. "You want to do the right thing? You want to be a templar and not a slave? Here's your chance. Think on it."

And he started to leave her to think on it, when her voice stopped him.

"Ser," she said. He paused, looking at her, as she met his gaze. There was a pained sadness in her face, but he saw her smile. It was a lovely smile, Samson thought to himself, though it was small, weary, and tinged with pain. "Thank you. For saving me, anyway."

For a moment, Samson was torn. He wanted to respond, but his tongue could not find the words in the face of that smile. He nodded his acknowledgement wordlessly and then swept out through the tent flap before he could do something foolish. Mend was waiting, her raven-gaze fixed on him with a strange expression.

"Feed her from the blue stock for now," he told her, quietly. The crone inclined her head silently, but Samson felt her gaze followed him all the way back to his own tent.

He sat down on his camp bed and fished for the vial he kept there, pressing it to his lips and tipping it back to let the smooth, red light illuminate him within and chase away the building darkness.

Trevelyan would stay. He had no doubt about that. A part of him was glad for it. She could be useful - her sword arm couldn't be bad if they'd sent her out hunting, and a noble-born agent could work in their favor. It would be better than whatever waited for her back in Ostwick. And, Samson realized, he wanted her to stay. There was something about her - her polite inexperience that reminded him of so many of the young templars he'd come up with in the Order before the harshness of the Gallows had hardened them, or maybe it was just that it had been a long time since he'd had a smile from a beautiful woman - that made her stick in his thoughts.

Another part of him, though, imagined that face and that smile stained red, twisted and monstrous, and he shuddered. It was the risk they all took, and it would catch up to them all eventually if they were not killed some other way. She was no different than the others. She would accept that in the end just as they all did. Except - perhaps not yet.

Perhaps, this was an opportunity for something different, he thought. Mend cut the lyrium rations for the younger recruits with pure lyrium anyway, slowly stepping up the dosage over time. Too much at once when there was no tolerance built up tended to provoke the grotesque mutations that came with overexposure. It would be little enough trouble to keep her on the blue for the time being. There were months of preparation ahead of them yet and the Elder One would appreciate the logic of an emissary that could pass unnoticed among the outside world - something his red templars could not do.

Samson stretched out on his pallet and closed his eyes for a moment, letting the reassuring strength of the lyrium wash through him. Yes, there would be time to introduce the red later, after he'd had the chance to assess her usefulness. And if she was one of those destined to turn monstrous, he could do her the favor at least of saving that pretty face for a little while longer.

 

~~0~~

 

_**The present, in Haven . . .** _

 

"This is a mistake," Cassandra observed, as she stood with Leliana at the overlook in front of Haven's chantry.

Below, Trevelyan was traversing the road down towards the village gates, trailed like a shadow by the templar that had been assigned to guard her. In the distance, the afternoon sun glinted off of the snow-capped mountains and frozen lake, and a breeze ruffled through the dark pine forest beyond. The latest recruits were training in the field between the village and the lake, and their shouts drifted back across the hamlet on the wind along with the constant ringing din from the smithy.

The former prisoner treaded cautiously, as if unable to believe that she was allowed to walk freely. Since her release that morning, a proper meal, a bath, and a chance to breathe fresh air again had restored some humanity back to her and taken some of the haunted stare out of her eyes, but she had said practically nothing since then and it was apparent that she was still waiting for the other boot to drop.  _Good_ , Cassandra thought, her lip curling slightly. Cullen had insisted on giving Trevelyan this chance to prove herself good to her word - and, admittedly, he seemed to be having the best luck getting through to her so far - but even with a constant guard and Leliana's people keeping an eye on her besides, it was a risky gambit.

"Perhaps," Leliana replied.

The spymaster had been quiet and more pensive than usual since the interrogation. The failure of the ineffectual torture session and Trevelyan's subsequent response to Cullen's more civil entreaty, had disturbed her colleague, Cassandra knew. It had disturbed her as well. The Seekers were not above using torture, but only in extremity and only as a last resort. If they had been less hasty, if she had made her concerns known instead of letting Leliana's surety and the desperation of the situation get the better of her, the outcome might have been very different. And, she could now admit, the method that Leliana had devised - the use of the lyrium in Trevelyan's body as a method of dispensing pain - had been unworthy of their cause. Lessons learned, and a plan for dealing with the rifts was better than nothing - but the situation was more difficult now rather than less.

The Left Hand shifted slightly as a breeze off of the lake rustled her cloak and chain hauberk. "We'll observe her. If she will not talk to us, then we might learn more about what she's hiding by where she goes and what she does. Cullen has the better rapport with her now, besides. We can use that."

The Right Hand glanced at the Left, noting the smooth profile of Leliana's face - apparently unconcerned, though Cassandra knew that Leliana was in fact deeply concerned.

"Do you think that she will actually help?"

The spymaster was silent for a moment, considering the question.

"As long as she believes that she is protecting the interests of whoever orchestrated all of this, then yes. We need to maintain that illusion as long as possible." A brief half-smile curved on Leliana's lips. "Guilt can be a most effective tool. When you take her to meet with Mother Giselle near Redcliffe, make sure she sees the damage that is being done and the good that our people are doing on the ground. Give her something to think about."

This was always Leliana's way, Cassandra thought, feeling slightly disgruntled. It was the Left Hand's job to deal with the hidden dangers, to gather information and pull the strings from a distance. As always, the Right Hand would have to be the one to bring the blade down if it turned out wrong.

"If she tries to escape, I  _will_ kill her, Leliana. Whatever the Mark on her hand is, even if it is the only thing that can close the rifts for now, we cannot risk her taking it back to our enemies - whoever they may be."

For a moment, the only sound between them was the distant, barked orders of the soldiers and the ambient noise of an overcrowded village trying to be the fortress it needed to become.

"If she tries to escape, then I would expect no less," the spymaster agreed. "And so we must ensure that it does not come to that. We need her to use the Mark to close the Breach - but now we also need her to be the Herald. The story has spread too far."

The mention of the title - a sore spot between them - ruffled Cassandra and she frowned accusingly.

"You don't believe that she was sent by Andraste or the Maker. So, why should it matter to you what they say about her?"

The story of the woman behind Trevelyan in the rift had become common knowledge with a frightening speed. The narrative of the Herald, sent by Andraste in Thedas' hour of need, had troubled Cassandra - more now than it had before the interrogation. And yet, it all fit together so neatly. The explosion of the Breach - and the only woman who could close it. The formation of the Inquisition - and a ready-made figurehead to draw attention to it. It seemed ludicrous to her that Andraste would choose one of the very conspirators that had caused the disaster as her champion and messenger - and yet history was full of divinely inspired heroes who had been granted the grace to redeem themselves from terrible beginnings. She knew that her thoughts on the matter were troubled, plagued with doubt, suspicion, faith, and hope all alike, but if there was a chance . . .

"Weren't you the one who said that she was exactly what we needed when we needed it?" Leliana replied, her normally frosty smile turning faintly humorous for a moment. "It doesn't matter. Only what she is thought to be matters at this point. We need resources and support for the Inquisition, and we have the perfect tool at our disposal, if we can convince the Chantry to stop decrying her as a monster. If she can be persuaded to play the part convincingly, that is enough for me. We can arrange for her to receive justice after she has exhausted her usefulness.  If you believe in her, then all the more reason for you to persuade her, yes?"

Though this was delivered as half a joke, there was a bitterness under the words, too. Something in Leliana had broken after the Divine's death at the Conclave. They had been very close, Cassandra knew, but this was more than just the loss of a friend. The spymaster had declined to speak of it, and Cassandra had kept her distance, unsure of how to help her colleague. This cavalier attitude towards the possibility of Trevelyan actually being the Herald was a manifestation of that cynical brokenness. Starting another argument about it would not help.

"We will see what happens in Redcliffe," Cassandra said decisively. Leliana nodded and turned, crunching through the light snowfall back to her tent to continue her ceaseless work. For her part, Cassandra stayed, watching carefully as Trevelyan paused and exchanged a few words with her escort before trudging out through the gates into the muddy mire of Haven's dirt road and towards the army camps.

 _And we will see whether there is any hope for you_ , she thought, her jaw tightening.  _Or any of us._

 ~~0~~

Walking through the dirt roads of Haven again was an eerie experience for Magna. The first time she had passed through the gates seemed like an age ago, walking up to the Conclave in a light drizzle at the side of Mother Agnes - her great aunt, she remembered with a vague pang of regret, though she had never met the woman before her return to Ostwick. It had seemed like a poxy little second-rate pilgrim's rest then and she had paid little attention to the particulars, her mind too focused on remembering the tasks ahead of her and her stomach busily twisting itself into knots over the same. The second time, she had been confused, bound, and in pain as the Seeker frogmarched her through the panicked morass towards the Temple and the demon-spitting Breach.

Now, the sky was clear - save for the stewing, pustulent hole in the world that hung over the mountains - and the sun was shining. There was no rush and hurry save the bustle of busy people about their work. And everywhere she walked, those people stared and whispered.

She paused in front of the gates, feeling a strange shiver in her limbs that was not due to the chilly air. They had provided her with warm clothes upon her release that morning, at least. The other leaders of this - what had they called it? Inquisition - had confirmed what their commander Cullen had told her: that she was at liberty to walk the village so long as she remained cooperative and did not attempt to escape. Magna could not help but feel like this was yet another trick, though. At any moment, she half-expected to be dragged back down under the chantry hall where the Left and Right Hands of the former Divine waited to begin their questioning anew.

She could feel eyes watching her, pricking and probing her skin like needles to see what was underneath. That paranoia was likely an aftereffect of the torture - her system shocked by the lack of lyrium and then too much all at once - but it was hard to tell and not knowing only made it worse. Ever since her first experience with the disorienting, mind-sickening hallucinations that came from severe withdrawal, she had been unable to shake the fear of losing her grasp on what was real and what was not. A great many hours of meditation had been spent strengthening her will and concentration after that experience, and she repeated the calming mantras silently to herself to still the hot spike of worry in her gut.

Still, she  _was_ being watched. Glancing back, she could see the Seeker standing on the overlook, arms folded. Waiting - but for what? Magna glanced around, nervously.

"Am I permitted outside of the gate?" she asked, turning to her escort for reassurance that she was not about to bring down half a guard regiment on her head by stepping outside.

The woman had been introduced to her as Ser Lysette, a Ferelden templar perhaps a year or so younger than Magna herself. Lysette had said nothing since their initial meeting and seemed content simply to follow and watch - a templar's chief occupation anyway. Likely, she had been ordered to keep her own counsel as much as possible. The younger templar's dark eyes blinked back at Magna, surprised to have been addressed directly.

 _This must be something like what the mages felt for us at the Circle_ , Magna thought to herself uncomfortably, waiting for her escort's answer.  _Conscious of eyes on you at every moment and never certain whether you are about to cross some invisible line._

"Yes," Lysette replied, firmly, after a moment in which Magna knew she was mentally reviewing her orders. She frowned. "So long as you do not go far from the walls."

"That's fair enough," Magna conceded. Though their orders no longer came from the same source, they were both still templars and that carried with it a kind of kinship. She knew too well what it was to be freshly knighted, trying to fill the armor as best she could.

Anxiously, she stepped through the gates. Her eyes took in the vista of the mountain lake, the training fields, and the muddy road that ran along the palisade wall in the direction of a small smithy and horse paddock. The mountains stretched as far as the eye could see. There was no outcry, nor did hidden guards swoop in to drag her away. Magna stood next to the dirt track, frozen with a kind of relief that brought no comfort with it.

 _What now?_   she thought. She had prepared herself to die, but it had not occurred to her that she might survive as a captive. For practically the first time in her life, she was utterly alone. Ever since she could remember, she had been part of the comfortable routine of some institutional hierarchy or other. First the Chantry school, then the Templar Order, then Samson's new Order. There had scarcely been a day in her life since she was six years old that had not been governed entirely by rules, schedules, and orders. And there had always been someone there to dispense those orders. Now, surrounded by enemies, there was no one but herself.

She had promised to help close the rifts. That much she could do without compromising Samson's or the Elder One's objectives. Their commander - Cullen - had been right about one thing: all this destruction could not be part of the Elder One's plan. He aspired to the Black City and its empty throne to restore order to a neglected and disordered world, not to bring it down in flames. Her palm still smarted, numbed, and burned with the magical mark branded on it. Mercy for her failings was beyond hope at this point, whatever the outcome, but she could still try to make it right. It was never too late until you were dead, as Samson said.

"Well, look who's back in the land of the living," a friendly voice said from behind Magna and startled her from her thoughts.  She turned to see a dwarf in a red, open-necked tunic approaching her. She had met him before. He had been with the Seeker and that elven apostate on the day that she had gone up to the Breach. The one with the unusual crossbow.

"Varric," she greeted him, uncertainly, summoning the name awkwardly from her chaotic memories. The details of that day were fuzzy and she could not be sure how accurate her recollection was. He smiled, so she knew that she had guessed rightly.

He had reddish-blonde hair and was beardless save for a day or two's unshaven scruff on the chin and cheeks - strange for a dwarf in her experience - but still a relatively handsome specimen of his race. The bridge of his broad nose was faintly scarred and crooked, indicating that it had been broken at some point. The brown eyes that lit on her were kind enough, though.

"I was beginning to think -" he started, affably, and then she saw his gaze move to her throat and his smile fell a little. Magna reached up to run a hand over the rough twin scars under her chin, self-consciously, and looked away. She hadn't had an opportunity to look into a mirror yet and so she couldn't be sure what the scars looked like, but they must be quite noticeable. Varric glanced at Lysette, who moved to stand a few yards away - still watching, but apparently not wanting to be confused for a participant in the conversation. The dwarf rubbed a thick hand down the back of his neck, embarrassed. "So, the rumor's true, huh? Are you alright?"

The response was exactly opposite of what Magna expected. He had been there at the Temple. He must know what she had done. So, why did he care if she was alright, so long as she cooperated? But there was genuine concern in the dwarf's tone, and so she only shrugged.

"I'm alive. I suppose that qualifies."

"I knew Cassandra was angry, but I wouldn't have thought she would go  _that_  far. No wonder Curly was in an uproar yesterday," Varric replied, shaking his head.

"Curly?" Magna asked, confused. She could not help but feel she was already losing the thread of the conversation.

Varric turned and gestured towards the soldier's camp, where Magna could see the figure of Commander Cullen standing with some of his officers, watching and commenting on a training exercise. Now that she could see him in full daylight, Magna noted that his hair was a bright blond and indeed slightly curly.

She had not gotten a good look at the commander for those few minutes that he had been down in the cellar dungeon, and so she studied him now. He was tall, with a lean build despite his bulky armor and fur mantle, and perhaps ten years or so older than her. He carried himself with authority, but not the puffed up kind that she had seen in many other officers. She watched him break from his conversation to move over to a set of sparring soldiers in order to personally correct the angle of a shield. Not one to sit back on his heels and let his people do all the work, then.

"So, let me ask you something, then," Varric continued, pulling her attention away from the commander and back to him. The dwarf's bushy brow wrinkled thoughtfully. "Cassandra says that we're headed out to Redcliffe tomorrow, since you've agreed to help close some of the rifts. Were you thinking repentant villain ends up the reluctant hero or maybe just tragic anti-hero? I'm a writer, so these distinctions are important."

 _Villain_. The word hit Magna uncomfortably, but she could see how it might seem that way to the people who didn't know the truth. She had never wanted to harm anyone - at least not without cause. She had become a templar to protect others. That's all she had ever wanted to do since she had first arrived at the Chantry school and met the few templars in residence there. It was why she had ultimately decided to fall in with Samson and the Elder One's plans. The world had gone mad since the Fifth Blight. The only way it was ever going to get better was if someone took charge and sorted it all out.

"I'm not a villain, Varric," she said, before she could stop herself. The words dug hard at her heart. She smiled, sadly. "I'm not a hero, either. I just want to do the right thing. I mucked it up somehow, so I have to fix it. They can argue about what that makes me once it's done."

"Well," the dwarf replied, kindly, returning the smile, "sounds like a hero to me."

He took a step back towards the gates and shrugged.

"Anyway, I'd better go pack. Just wanted to see if you were holding up alright. And I'd get some rest if I were you. It's a long way to Redcliffe and once Cassandra gets going, she doesn't stop for anyone. I can tell you that from experience," he told her, walking backwards a few paces. "And, hey, now that you're on your feet, drop by the tavern sometime and I'll buy you a drink. One prisoner to another."

Despite herself, Magna felt a genuine smile curve on her lips this time and nodded, watching Varric disappear back through the gates into the village. The dwarf seemed to be a good sort, but then - if there was anything she had learned at the Circle - not everyone who was friendly could be trusted. But, it seemed likely that Varric, along with the Seeker, would be helping her with the rifts and there was no reason to antagonize either of them without need. And a sympathetic person who was not entirely invested in this Inquisition might be useful, if she were to try to escape.

She turned and glanced back in the direction of the army camp only to find that Cullen was walking in her direction. He was reading a missive of some sort, but he glanced up as he approached her and paused.

It was the first good look she had gotten at his face. His features were even and well proportioned, save for a long-healed scar that stretched upwards a few inches from his lip on the right side. There were lines on his brow and around the eyes; he had the look of a man who had gotten little sleep of late, though his hazel eyes were clear and intelligent. Under other circumstances, Magna might have found him handsome. She nodded to him silently, feeling the tension that had bled out of her while she was talking to Varric return in force. He smiled faintly, though, approaching her.

"I was just going up to meet with the others about your mission to Redcliffe tomorrow," he told her, his tone courteous. "You should likely be there as well, so you know what to expect. Walk with me, if you like."

The words were delivered as a request rather than an order. She could refuse. Magna knew she probably should refuse. But, the commander had, so far, declined to pressure her into answering questions she either could not or would not answer, and he had treated her humanely where others had not. She would not trust him, but perhaps his good will had earned at least a small amount of her own in return.

"As you wish," she consented and fell in beside him as they entered the gates. Out of the corner of her eye, Magna saw Lysette turn to follow a respectful distance behind them like a shadow.

For a few moments, there was a tense silence and Magna tried to keep her eyes focused ahead of her, though she could not help but risk a glance at Cullen to try and divine his intent. It was an awkward situation. He was not playing the role of an enemy, and so she found it harder to react to him as one. Still, she would not be the first one to speak as they ascended the terraced road that lead up towards the chantry.

"I'm glad to see you up and around," the commander ventured, finally. "Master Adan does good work, but your condition was a concern there for awhile."

"I'm fit enough to fight," Magna replied, guarded. Her left hand clenched weakly as she did every time her thoughts turned back to the Mark, feeling the fading sting of it there on her palm.

The conversation seemed to stall there. As they approached the Chantry doors, Cullen fixed her with a strange expression, as if there was something more he wanted to say to her, but could not quite find the words. He seemed to be a decent man. He seemed to want to believe that she was decent, too, and that was tricky. She could not let herself begin to like him, or any of these people, lest she lose focus on who she was and what she owed to those elsewhere. He held the door for her and she entered the Chantry hall wordlessly.

There was murmuring conversation behind the door of the council chamber already, voices that Magna recognized as belonging to the Seeker and the spymaster Leliana. She paused with her hand on the latch, collecting herself. Though they had struck a deal, the squeamish, animal fear of facing her torturers again made Magna's heart race. She breathed in, and let the breath drain back out slowly, closing her eyes.  _Fortress in the mind_ , she told herself, recalling her training.

"It won't happen again," Cullen said from behind her, quietly.

She turned and looked at him over her shoulder. His expression was grave and somewhat pained. He knew why she paused - she could see it in the way he looked at her, his eyes dropping to the scars on her chin for a moment before moving back to her eyes. She did not know how he understood it, but he nodded to her all the same.

"No more questions. They won't hurt you. I gave you my word."

He meant this. Magna returned the nod, acknowledging the reassurance though she was not entirely reassured. And she turned back to the door, opening it, and stepped into the council room beyond to begin the work in earnest.


	3. Armor Laced With Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the right path is rarely the straightest and love comes only with sacrifice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been awhile. Bad author, yes, I know. Sorry about that.
> 
> It took a long time to get this chapter to where I felt it was "right". Hopefully, the wait is worth it. The next chapter will hopefully be a bit easier

**_Three months ago, in Orlais. . ._ **

 

The world was about to change.  Samson could feel the giddy vertigo of it in his blood, throbbing through his veins along with the lyrium and bolstering him upwards and onwards.  Leaning over the maps and missives in his command tent, his long fingers clenched and unclenched on the wooden table in thoughtful anticipation.  

Maddox had finished the armor.  In the north, the Elder One’s Tevinter followers were preparing to march under the former slave Calpernia.  In the south, the conflict between the rebel mages and the rogue Templars was reaching a fever pitch, sowing chaos through Ferelden.  In the west, forces were being brought to bear on the viperous royal court of Orlais, stirring it into a maelstrom of bitter revolt while out in the desert wastes the Wardens turned in on themselves in fear and despair.  In the east, the remains of the Templar Order stewed and struggled.  Samson would see them liberated from their bonds soon enough.  All that was needed now was the Elder One’s word and the birthing pangs of the new age would begin.

A forward patrol had spotted the returning Red Templar emissaries on the road that morning.  Given the fair weather, they would arrive within the hour, bearing new reports and intelligence to be digested as well as fresh news from abroad.  If all was well, somewhere in their pouches would be the orders that Samson had been waiting for.  But that was not the only reason his heart was pounding at the thought of their return.

It had been more than a month now since he had seen Magna. Over the half year since she had joined the Red Templars, she had proven herself more useful than Samson had initially imagined.  She was highborn enough to command respect, humble enough to be approachable, quick-witted, and as loyal as a hound.  Still abstinent from the red lyrium, Magna could go where others of the Order could not, and so she was an ideal diplomat.  She had become Samson’s eyes and ears and hands abroad, and that made her more useful in the field than sitting around the camp.  Still, he wanted her back home.  Her absence on this long trip had affected him like the lyrium-ache and there was no philter that would quell it.

It was tricky.  Samson stepped back from the table and stretched, hearing the crack in his neck as he turned his head and rotated his shoulders, loosening his limbs from where he had stood in one position for too long.  He’d taken Magna under his wing partly because her usefulness had been evident from the start and partly because he had saved her with his own two hands and he felt responsible for her.  But there were other reasons.

Before he could turn his mind to the next task, Samson heard the hails of the templars on guard duty.  The riders had arrived.  Running a hand quickly through his dark hair to smooth it, he turned and strode out of the tent.  He tried to be there to greet his men whenever they returned from a mission.  It was good for morale.  It showed respect for their work, and you had to give respect to get it.  He was anxious for the news that they brought with them - the sooner the order was received, the sooner they could be on the move.  That this coincided with an excuse to greet Magna now rather than wait for her to report in to him, he told himself, was only a bonus.

The five riders slowed from a trot and dropped down from their mounts at the edge of camp, handing off the reins of their horses and stretching stiff limbs.  Each wore the traditional armor of a templar knight even though Maddox had begun to fashion new armor to accommodate the size and strength of the new red-lyrium infused army.  Respect for the Order still prevailed among most of the common folk of Thedas, and so a group of templars on the road was beneath suspicion.  They looked looked dusty and weary from the long ride, but they straightened upon spotting him, bowing their heads and clapping fist to breastplate in salute.  

Samson returned the gesture, a genuine smile on his lips.  His templars.  He never missed an opportunity to be proud of them.

The usual routine followed.  He clasped arms, pounded backs, praised them all by name in front of their fellows and felt them shine back at him with their renewed loyalty.  He sent four of them away to eat and sleep with orders for a double ration of ale to celebrate their homecoming.  And that left him alone with Magna to learn what the future would hold. 

The younger templar removed her greathelm, spilling a braid of sweat-dampened blonde hair down her back, and Samson was conscious of his breath catching as his eyes scanned her face for the first time in too many weeks.  

Magna had changed considerably since their first meeting.  She had always been pretty, but she had been scared then - haunted and wracked with guilt and fear over what she had witnessed and what awaited her back at the Circle.  Six months under his command and there was now little trace of the frightened girl he had pulled out of the swamp.  She moved with confidence.  Her face, no longer hollowed with hunger and pain, had a healthy glow to it from exertion and from the relief of coming home again.  Her eyes were clear as polished emerald, lacking the greasy, filmy red that the others developed over time.  The elegant arches of her lips tipped up into a genuine smile when she saw him that was perfectly fashioned to break a man’s heart and Samson caught himself staring.

More than once, in the quiet darkness of his bedroll, he had imagined what it would be like to feel those soft lips against his face and flesh.  His body heated, remembering, but Samson forced his attention back to the present.  Not here, not now.  He quickly glossed onward, clapping her shoulder as he turned to indicate that she should walk with him back to the command tent.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Samson told her as they walked, trying to regain his composure.  Magna followed at his side, apparently oblivious to his momentary lapse.  “What’s the news?”

“Things are coming to a boil quickly, ser, and no mistake,” she replied, raising her eyebrows and blowing out a sigh.

He listened to her description of the chaos in Ferelden between the mages and the Order, the ongoing schism between the Order and the Chantry, and the latest failures of diplomacy.  Typical of the Chantry to think that the Templars would come to heel simply at their word after everything that had happened.  He tried to imagine the consternation of all those Mothers and Sisters as they realized that their guard dogs had slipped the leash for good this time - that their power had never been more than empty words after all.  It would have been funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious.

He listened to Magna detail the reports from agents within the Seekers and nodded with satisfaction.  Everything in place, just as planned.

“And the Elder One?” Samson pressed as they arrived back at the tent.  

He had been concerned about this part. When he had sent Magna north to deliver his latest reports and retrieve their orders, Samson had known that it would come with certain risks.  There was no reason that the Elder One should have found his protege wanting, but the ancient magister could be unpredictable.  Still, she had returned intact, much to his relief, so it couldn’t have gone too badly.

Though her face remained still, Samson could detect a faint unease in her expression at the mention of the Elder One.  He understood.  It was a lot to take in at first, especially for someone raised in the Chantry.  Magna slipped the strap of the small leather courier’s pouch from around her neck, opened it, and held out a sealed letter to him.  Samson took it, noting the blood red seal standing out on the smooth parchment.  It was only ordinary paper and ink, but it felt heavy in his hands.  Magna’s voice was earnest and solemn when she spoke.

“The Divine has called for a conclave.  All the most prominent Mothers, Templar leadership, and representatives from the rebel mages together in one place in a last attempt at peace.  The Elder One seemed to have an especial interest in it.  He ordered me to make haste back here with this as quickly as we could ride.  I don’t know, ser, but I think it’s all going to happen soon.  What we’ve been working for.”

_And about sodding time,_ Samson thought to himself.  

He had never had a head for religion.  All of that praying in the Order had washed over him like so many parroted nursery rhymes.  The lyrium and the work was all that had mattered. He didn’t give a toss about gods one way or the other, but he understood power well enough.  And he understood that the only way any of them were going to pull through this horror of a world was to get behind the only power that was going to matter soon enough and see it through.

“Then we’ll be ready,” he replied, confidently.  

He noted how Magna’s shoulders relaxed, eased by his certainty.  She was one of his most ardent converts to the cause, but Samson knew that when it came down to it, her devotion was personal.  She believed largely because he seemed to believe so strongly.  Her faith was less in the Elder One than it was in her fellow Templars and in him - and that made the feelings that assailed Samson when he thought of her more complicated.

He wanted her.  Viscerally.  Like a smoldering fire in his gut or a fever in his brain.  Yearning for her return this last month was the final proof he needed to admit it to himself.  It was stupid - the type of foolish, callow, adolescent infatuation that had gotten Maddox Tranquiled all those years ago.  It had been too long since he had had a woman, that was all.  Magna was too young -  too fair and too noble - for a wreck like him. As close as they had become, she looked up to him as a commander and a mentor, not a lover.  He knew that.  And yet - and yet when she gazed at him as she was doing now he could almost imagine that she entertained the same secret thoughts and desires behind those green eyes.

“Anyway, good to have you back,” Samson told her, his voice sounding gruffer to his ears than he meant it as he pulled the conversation back on track.  “You’ve done good work.  My right hand, as always.  Go get cleaned up and get something to eat.  We’ll go over this,” he said, gesturing with the letter, “later.”

Magna’s face lightened at the praise and she saluted.  “Thank you, ser.  It’s good to be back.”

She turned, striding off towards the billets, and Samson watched her go with his mind aflame in warning and want.  Shaking his head, he snapped his attention back to the letter in his hand.  He was getting soft, to let wicked distraction get in the way of the moment he had been waiting for these many long months.  Finding his stool, he hunkered down and tore open the seal, ready to read the words that would send his men marching out towards destiny.  There would be time enough to consider the other - if there was to be any other - later.

 

~~0~~

 

Nightfall was always peaceful in the mountains.  As the bloody red and purple sunset sank down into the darkness of the trees, the Red Templars settled down from their work to rest and eat together amid the background chorus of insects.  Though the days of regimented prayers and Chantry services were long since gone, the habits of communal living and brotherhood remained.  Scores of red-eyed men and women gathered around campfires to laugh and talk over their bread and ale, save for a few who huddled in silence, their faces growing blanker and more heavily crimson-veined by the day.  They would disappear from the communal fires soon enough and join another, growing camp further out into the trees.

Samson paced restless from fire to fire.  He exchanged a few words here and there and put on his confident public face as was expected of him, but his real thoughts were left unsaid.  He would not burden his men with his concerns.  Let them enjoy the few moments between work and sleep while they could.  There would be precious little time for that beginning tomorrow.

The Elder One’s orders were tucked securely into his belt pouch, but the words still rolled through Samson’s mind like the thunder of an approaching storm and brought with them just as much unease.  Magna had been right.  Everything that they had been working towards this last year was coming to fruition and far sooner than Samson had imagined.  It was time to bring the Templar leadership into the fold at last.  Tomorrow morning would see preparations to move east.  But other pieces of the Elder One’s endgame were being moved into place as well, and Samson had not expected that Corypheus would choose Magna to play a role in that.

Away from the others, he settled himself down onto a chunk of broken stone and pondered in the gloaming dusk.  If the Elder One had requested any of his other templars, he would have sent them gladly.  They lived for their duty and he would not deny it to them.  But Magna was different.  He had allowed himself to care too much for her.  And Samson had a strong feeling in his gut that, whoever was sent to lay the groundwork for the Elder One’s entrance to the Conclave, it was likely that they would not return.

He could, perhaps, beg off.  He could keep Magna close at hand and find another catspaw to infiltrate the Conclave.  The Elder One had not explicitly ordered him to send her.  Though, Magna was clearly the best tool for this particular job - her nobility and clean record with the Circle would put her above suspicion and her loyalty to the cause would make her less likely to falter.  His reluctance to dispatch her would raise suspicions that Samson did not want to answer.  Still.   _Still._

Why shouldn’t he keep her for himself?  In the world to come, he would be the right hand of a god, reborn in blood and pain and red, red lyrium.  With the armor, he would be almost godlike himself - a fortress in body and in mind.  His Red Templars would be an unstoppable army, the hammer of a deified Corypheus.  He was no longer Samson the broken Dark Town addict.  He was so much more now.  Why should he not have the woman he wanted in the bargain?

The more he thought about it, the more Samson’s blood surged through his veins, his heartbeat quickening at the image of Magna by his side, in his arms, in his bed.  Would she desire that as well?  She clearly cared for him.  That was evident in dozens of small ways.  If there was a chance that she wanted him as much as he burned inside for her, then he would never give her up to Corypheus.  And there was only one way to find out.

Tonight.  It would have to be tonight, Samson decided.  He would go to Magna and he would tell her all.  And if she stayed with him, he would find another to open the way into the Conclave and find a way to justify it to the Elder One later.  If not - well, heaven or hell awaited and he could only hope.  Now it was down to choosing the best moment.

“Such a determined face,” a reedy voice observed from his right.  

Samson glanced up, preventing himself from startling, to find Mend watching him.  The crone apostate’s stringy hair hung down around her wrinkled, sallow face like a curtain of dead autumn weeds and she grinned nastily at him.  

“Like a fox about to steal into a chicken coop.”

The old woods-witch had done an admirable job as a healer and general apothecary for the Red Templars.  She made a show of harmless, folksy grandmotherly-ness, which put many of the younger recruits at ease over time, but Samson was not fooled.  No apostate got to Mend’s great age without being wily and clever and there was a mind as sharp as an arrowhead behind the woman’s muddy grey eyes and gummy-toothed smile.

“I can guess which hen you’re after, too, I’ll wager,” the healer continued, dropping her voice as she lowered herself down onto the stone seat a little away from Samson with a rheumatic grunt.  Samson glanced at her, annoyed at the uncomfortable presumption, but Mend only chuckled.  “Can’t fool me.  Men are the easiest creatures in the world to read, and I’ve had too many of ‘em over the years for you to pull the wool over these old eyes.”

“Then you ought to know to stay out of it,” Samson retorted, keeping his voice low.  He did not want to discuss this with the wretched harridan, but he knew better than to write off Mend’s advice wholesale.  She would not have approached him if she did not have an agenda in mind.

 “Aren’t we the tetchy one,” Mend mocked back.  She cocked a withered eyebrow at Samson’s scowl.  “You’ll want to watch that.  Don’t want your lady love finding you out.  Don’t want to dash all her fine illusions about you too quickly.”

The words brought Samson’s rising anger up short.  He turned and studied the apostate, noting the mischievous glimmer in her eyes and realizing the truth.

“You’ve talked to her.  What did she say?” he demanded, eager to know and galled in equal measure to have to hear it from the witch.  

Mend sniffed disapprovingly, a surprisingly high-brow gesture, and shrugged.  “Well, I shouldn’t carry tales.  What’s an old woman’s natter to a man like you anyway?”

“ _Mend.”_

“If you insist,” the apostate relented, grinning.  She was enjoying his discomfort, but Samson would say nothing that might actually prevent her from speaking now.  She had his attention, much as he hated it, and she knew it.  The old woman smoothed her patched robe.  “‘Course she talks to me.  They all do.  Old Mother Mend doesn’t just soothe the hurts on the outside, you know.  Listen to their problems, give ‘em a pat on the head, a little tea and sympathy, and you learn all sorts of things. ”

“Get on with it,” Samson growled, his patience waning.  “What did she say?”

“That girl thinks the sun rises and sets out of your trousers every day.”  Mend shook her head, wrinkling her nose as if in disgust at the idea.  “Wants to do you proud.  Worries she’ll disappoint.  Asked my advice before she left last time, the wet little poppet.  I told her to keep her head down, focus on her work.  That’s what you’ll do, too, if you’ve got any sense.” 

The world seemed to go silent aside from the hammer of Samson’s heart against his ribs and the rush of blood in his ears.  So, Magna did have some sort of feelings for him.  It hadn’t been a trick of his mind.  Wild possibility overwhelmed him, but he dragged his attention back to Mend.  The witch’s eyes narrowed.

“I see that thought,” she warned, stonily.  “Don’t be daft, dearie.  You’ve got a sack of bigger fish to worry about.”

“It’s none of your business, Mend.”

“Oh, yes.  I expect I’ll just be able to skip back off into the woods if you lot fail.  Crouch in the bog eating mushrooms and frogspawn until it’s all over with.”  Mend’s sarcasm was scalding.  She glowered at Samson.  “I’ve got a stake in this now just as much as you do.  It’s my neck, too, if you slip up because your mind is in her ladyship’s knickers and not out there where it should be.  You talk a pretty piece about  your templars.  You know what the red is doing to them while you’re mooning about like a dog sniffing around a bitch in heat.  You don’t have time to waste on wenching, and you know it.”

If he had been less disciplined, Samson might have slapped the old bat for that.  As it was, he felt his fingertips press hard into the rough stone, the skin stinging as it scraped across granite, and clenched his teeth.  Strings of words - mostly foul - leapt into his throat, but he would not let them pass his lips. 

Because Mend - and how he loathed her at that moment with every fiber of his being - was ultimately right.

The hag watched him carefully, in silence, for a moment longer as he tried to compose himself.  Then she sighed, raising her thin shoulders and reaching out to pat his knee fondly.

“It’s hard, my pet, I know.  Listen to old Mother Mend and let this one go.  Or - if you must - bed her first, slake your desire, and then let me give her the red.  She’ll be less of a distraction soon enough and you’ll be free to concentrate on the campaign again.  You’ll thank me in the end.”

There was blood on his fingers now from where Samson had rubbed them raw against the stone.  The light of hope that had begun to burn in his brain when Mend had as much as admitted Magna’s feelings for him had turned to an angry, dark pit of bitterness.  He could not dispute her, because the templar and the commander in him knew - now, shamefully - that he had already begun to favor Magna too much.  He had considered contravening the Elder One’s direct request simply to keep her by his side.  And for what?

“You miserable, hateful old witch,” he growled out between clenched teeth, but he knew that Mend had won.  And she knew it, too.  The apostate smiled grimly.

“Aye.  I expect I am at that.”  She rose, wincing, and cast a glance back at Samson before she shuffled away.  “I’ll prepare one more philter on the morrow.  Sweet dreams, general.”

 

~~0~~

 

Magna was not to be found at any of the common fires.  The tent that she slept in was empty.  There was only one other place that Samson knew he could find her, and so he turned his steps towards Maddox’ smithy.

The Tranquil often worked late into the night, as long as his lamps could provide the light he needed for his crafting or research.  Tonight, however, the tent was quiet when Samson approached, save for the murmur of voices.

“Thank you for retrieving the materials I requested, Ser Trevelyan.  It is difficult to acquire them here.  They will be very useful,” Maddox’ unhurried, deliberate monotone voice was saying.  Samson paused outside, listening.

Magna’s tone was warm when she replied, but not in the patient, slow way that most people spoke to Tranquil.  It was easy to forget that, although their emotions were gone, the Tranquil were still just as intelligent as they had been before.  They were still people with thoughts and interior lives.  Just different.  Few grasped this, but Samson had been pleasantly surprised to find that Magna did.  She spoke to Maddox as a real person.  It was yet one more thing about her that kept his attention.

“It’s hard to get much of anything out here.  And you’re welcome.  I don’t know when I’ll be away again, but just get me a list of what you need.  I’ll see what I can do.”  She paused for a moment and then continued.  “Remember, you can call me Magna if you want.  We’re friends and comrades, after all.  No need to be formal.”

“If you prefer it, I will remember,” Maddox replied.  “And I will repair your gauntlet in the morning.  It is a very simple repair.  I should be able to complete it quickly.”

“I could have knocked it back into shape on the road, I suppose, but you always do the best work.”

“It is good to be able to help a friend,” the Tranquil replied matter-of-factly.  Sometimes, there was more of the old Maddox - the goofy young mage that Samson had known back in the Chantry - in the smith’s voice than should have been possible.  Samson stepped through the flap of the tent.

Magna was out of her armor now, dressed in tunic, breeches, and surcoat.  Her flaxen hair was washed and neatly brushed; it shone like threads of gold in the light from Maddox’ brazier.  His heart ached anew when he saw her expression lift with pleasure at his arrival.  Maddox gazed at him with the same focus expression that the Tranquil always wore, neither happy nor sad.  Content was the best a Tranquil could hope for.  The young man held a templar’s steel gauntlet - Magna’s - in his hands.

“You’re right, he does do the best work,” Samson agreed to break the silence.  “I wouldn’t have my armor made or repaired by anyone else.”

“I do not believe that anyone else will be able to repair your armor,” Maddox replied, missing the point underneath the surface of the remark.  

Samson tried to smile, and tried not to let the turmoil inside of him show through the smile. He looked to Magna and saw her watching him, curiously.

“Why don’t we let Maddox get back to his rest?  It’s a fine night.  I could use a walk and some company.”

She was too sharp not to understand his meaning.  Magna turned and smiled at Maddox.

“Thanks again.  I’ll check back with you in the morning.  Good night”

The Tranquil nodded his goodbye and Samson stepped back out into the cooling air with the woman who had consumed his thoughts for most of the day.  He paused to look at her again.  In the faded greys of the starlight, she was even more beautiful.  The gentle contour of her cheekbones and jaw were achingly elegant, like a painting.  The long arch of her nose seemed aristocratic and refined.  Marcher upper class breeding at its finest.  Without the red lyrium in his blood, she was so far above him that it would have been like an ant falling in love with an eagle.  The stuff of jokes and ridiculous romantic plays.

“This way.  I want to stretch my legs a bit,” he told her, taking a path that led away from the camp, and Magna followed with no other bidding, walking beside him and glancing up at the patches of stars that could be seen through the dark trees.  Samson folded his hands behind his back to resist the temptation to reach out to her.

In the distance, there was a laugh from one of the fires.  Many of the men were saying their goodnights and heading back to bed down in their tents, not knowing what was waiting for them at sunrise, but knowing that they could face it better after a good sleep.

“I missed that sound.  It’s good to be back home,” Magna volunteered.  “Not that I'm complaining.  Duty is duty, but-”

“Let’s leave the work behind for awhile,” Samson interrupted, gently, and Magna obeyed.  Her hands were clasped in front of her.  He noticed her fingers twisting together, as if a little anxious.  Did his presence unsettle her just as hers did him?  Why had he never noticed this before?

They passed into a thin copse of trees, hidden from the camp and the watchful eyes of any sentries.  The mountain fell away to one side, affording a view of the dark hills and valley beyond.  It was a pretty view, even at night.  He had chosen to walk this way because he knew that Magna appreciated such things.  And he needed to buy himself time to make a decision.

The conversation with Mend earlier had infuriated him and knocked down all of his plans up to that point.  And yet their time was limited.  He could not delay even a day if his operative was to be planted with plenty of time to avoid suspicion.  Something had to be decided tonight.  Now.  And it would be a painful decision either way.

“Is something wrong, ser?” Magna asked, finally.  She was a bright one, canny, and he was rarely this taciturn in her presence.  It would be too easy to arouse her suspicion.  Samson tried to put her at ease.

“Listen to you ‘ser’ing me after all this time,” he teased her, trying his best although his heart was not altogether in it.  He was rewarded, though, by her smile as she exhaled a brief chuckle.

“Force of habit.  I’ve been on my best behavior for a month.”

“Well, it’s just me and you now,” he replied, allowing himself an anemic smile, “you can chuck that.  You risk too much on my behalf to stand on ceremony when we're alone.”

The silence threatened to stretch on once more as they walked among the trees, until Magna stopped and looked up at him.  She had never recoiled from his face after the first time, and she searched his eyes now for clues as to what was troubling him.  If she only knew.  If she only knew how much he wanted her.  Perhaps, by the end of the night, she would know - though Samson could not now determine if that would be blessing or bane.

“Something troubles you.  It isn’t my place, but-.”

“It’s more your place than anyone’s”, Samson assured her, trying to keep things light.  He turned and looked out across the valley, feeling her do the same silently.   _Do it_ , he told himself, over and over again.   _Get it over with_.

“You grew up in the Chantry,” he began.  “You ever do something against the rules, knowing you’d get the strap for it, but doing it all the same because it would have been worth it?”

Magna was quiet for a moment, considering, but she answered.  “Once.”

She didn’t elaborate.  He didn’t ask her to.

“How’d you feel afterward?”

Samson could tell that Magna was confused by the question.  She shifted slightly, staring at him, before she spoke.

 “It was the right thing to do at the time,” she replied, firmly, as much for herself as for him, and pressed onward before he could continue.  “Samson, I-”

 “Raleigh,” he corrected her, distracted. “My name.  Don’t go shouting it about, but you may as well use it.”

“Raleigh,” Magna repeated.  She reached out then, laying a hand on his shoulder.  

It was the first time she had ever touched him.  The first time in longer than he could even remember that anyone had touched him this way. Her palm was warm though the cloth of his tunic and he felt its slight pressure like candleflame running across his skin, igniting his hunger to life again.  

Images leapt to his mind of pulling her into an embrace, covering her lips with his own, feeling the rest of her body firm against his.  He imagined drawing her back into the trees and pressing her down against the loamy earth.  His body ached with the violence of the need.

_Bed her first, slake your desire, and then let me give her the red.  She’ll be less of a distraction soon enough._

His body felt frozen and aflame at the same time as he stared down at her.  Concern - and, yes, more than that - welled up in her face.

“You’re a good man,” she told him, earnestly.  The words had force.  She meant them.  She wanted him to believe them, too.  “The best that I know.  Whatever it is, you’ll do the right thing.  I know it.”

She squeezed his shoulder reassuringly, but it did not reassure.  Samson’s breath caught for an agonizing instant, and he swallowed it carefully.

“Sometimes the right thing is harder than it should be,” he replied, his voice steady despite himself.  “And no one thanks you for it.  You go on carrying it long after it’s done and over.”

“Let me carry it with you.”

He could feel that the moment had reached its apex.  If he wanted her, the time was now.  He could feel the hot primal instinct boiling beneath his belly at her nearness, at the animal, female scent of her skin and hair.  He could have her.  Mend had been right about that, too.  He could fuck her there among the pines and send her away in the morning with a few strong doses of the red tucked away in her pack so that he wouldn’t be tempted again and have it be done at last.  He would at least have the memory of her and the scent of her on his body for awhile.  He would have that, if he could have nothing else.

Samson turned in to face her.  The warmth of her flesh was no more than an inch from his own.  Magna’s face shone pale in the starlight as she looked up at him, unwavering, unsuspecting what was truly in his thoughts.  Wet behind the ears, he remembered thinking of her on their first meeting.  Too trusting.  With a numbness that crept up from his stomach and began to settle over his heart and mind, he reached up towards her cheek, his fingers splaying as he imagined the softness of her skin, the smoothness of the flesh under his sore fingertips.  He could submerge his pain in her tonight and let it be forgotten for awhile.

She remained still, waiting, her eyes transfixed with his.  She did not pull away.

_You’re a good man.  The best that I know._

Samson let his hand drop to settle firmly onto Magna’s shoulder.  A commander’s touch.  A comrade’s touch.  Not a lover’s.

“I’ve got another job for you,” he told her, his mouth as dry as the western desert.  The words tasted like ashes on his tongue.  “It’s important.  I can only send my best.  Someone I trust.  And that’s you.”

She listened to the plan.  She swore on her shield that she would not fail him.  Magna never failed him.  Samson walked her back to the billet tents and left her there.  She would be gone again in a day, riding out alone this time and with purpose.  As he swallowed a dose of the bittersweet red from the vial that he kept in his tent and lay down on his bedroll alone, Samson prayed - _prayed_ \- that he had not spared her a slow death just to send her off to a faster one.  And he cursed, with the same breath, whatever gods - present, past, or future - that had ordained it his lot in life to constantly crave exactly the thing that he could not have.


	4. Loyalty and Betrayal

 

Haven was growing more crowded by the day, Cullen thought to himself as he threaded his way through the village back down to the army’s field from the chantry.  

The Inquisition had gained ground far more quickly than he had predicted, both in territory, men, and influence.  The rifts - thanks to Trevelyan - were being sealed and some security was being returned to the countryside.  The Chantry had backed down.  The nobility were taking notice, now that the Inquisition’s effectiveness had been demonstrated.  It was beginning to look as if there was a real chance that they might be able to seal the sky.  If they could keep the momentum going.

He had kept abreast of Seeker Cassandra’s reports with interest.  The hinterlands of Redcliffe had been a hellish mess.  Templars against mages, their skirmishes spilling over into the refugee camps and costing innocent lives.  Demons and rifts dotting the farmlands and hills.  Bandits moving in to capitalize on the chaos and making the roads virtually impassible.  To Cassandra’s immense frustration, Trevelyan had steadfastly refused to become embroiled in the Inquisition’s affairs during the initial meeting in the war room, agreeing only to close the rifts and nothing more.  Yet, seeing the carnage and the immense suffering of the refugees firsthand had evidently changed her mind.

Magna had conducted herself admirably in the field, working alongside the Inquisition forces to secure food and resources for those that needed it and put an end to the most egregious fighting on both sides.  Not even Leliana could deny the fallen templar’s competency.  Whoever she answered to, it was clear that she had been a valuable officer.  At times, Cullen wondered if someone was out there looking for her, or if she had been written off as a casualty.  It was hard to imagine her absence going unremarked.

Good to her word, Magna sealed the rifts.   It was fortunate, they had all reflected at one time or another, that their chief means of closing the rifts was also a templar - someone trained in fighting demons.  It was hard going, but she did more than was asked of her and she never complained, though Magna initially had balked at speaking with Mother Giselle.  Leliana had advised not telling her of the planned meeting until the moment itself, which Cullen had not approved of, but he had to pick his battles.  Ultimately the ploy had worked, however.  The cleric’s mildness had resulted in a grudging agreement to talk in private.  Magna would not speak of what had passed between them, but she emerged from the meeting chastened and offered no further resistance when plans were made to travel to Val Royeaux.

“You talk to her,” Cassandra had said to Cullen in the council chamber earlier that morning.  “She is more likely to answer if it comes from you.”

After their efforts at Redcliffe, the Seeker’s opinion of their prisoner had begun to shift somewhat.  As severe and single-minded as she could be, Cassandra was not heartless and she was no fool.  Though the Seeker still wanted justice for the Divine’s death, she no longer spoke of Magna with contempt.  It had been Cassandra’s idea, in fact, to bring Magna into the discussion of whether the power they needed to close the Breach should ultimately come from the mages or the templars.

With the Inquisition’s momentum mounting, the time was quickly approaching when they would need to make a decision.  Neither the mages nor the Order seemed particularly palatable - the mages had the most reason to ally with the Inquisition, but there was the risk of possession and there were grave political ramifications, while the Templar leadership seemed to be stuck in a state of militant paranoia.  The situation was too dire to waver long, however.  The Seeker and spymaster seemed set on recruiting the mages, while Josephine and Cullen himself preferred to approach the Order.  With deadlock in the council, another voice was needed and it might as well be the only one who had the power to seal the Breach at all - Magna.  

They could not force her to cooperate.  Although she had treated Solas and the few other mages in Haven with courtesy and circumspection, it was entirely possible that she might refuse to work with the rebels at all.  Even among the best of templars, tensions ran high where mages were concerned.  Prisoner or not, they needed her as a willing participant and so her input needed to be considered if nothing else.

As he stepped through the gates, Cullen scanned over the ranks of his soldiers and officers at their drills in the practice field by force of habit.  Their numbers were growing by the week, although mostly with idealistic recruits.  They could be trained, but it took time.  Templars would provide a much needed boost to the skill and discipline of the Inquisition’s forces, but the Order was intended to guard and protect, not fight as a formal army.  If an alliance was struck, it would have to be carefully negotiated.  The last thing they needed was more tension in the ranks.

After a moment of searching, he finally spotted Magna off to one side of the field.  When she was in Haven, she had taken to spending most of her time training - working over a pell, running sprints, going through the many exercises that kept the body in fighting shape.  Cassandra had initially been reluctant to allow her a weapon while she was not actively fighting, but practicality had won out in the end.  A warrior had to train.  Magna never asked to join any of the soldiers’ drills, but she was thorough and relentless on her own - almost punishingly so.  Just having her work in proximity to the army was enough to inspire his men to try harder.  To everyone except the Inquisition’s inner circle, she was the Herald of Andraste.  No one wanted to be found wanting in her eyes.

Today, however, she was sparring with Warden Blackwall.  Cullen paused, watching as the two warriors - one bearing the Templar shield, one bearing the Warden’s griffon shield - squared off against each other.

Blackwall was a peculiar sort of man, taciturn and solemn, but he had been a valuable ally to the Inquisition so far.  He had allowed Josephine to make use of the Grey Warden treaties to gain supplies and men that they would not otherwise have had access to and he had lent his considerable expertise at training soldiers where he could.  Even more usefully, perhaps, he was one of the few members of the Inquisition that Magna would speak to of her own volition and he seemed to have taken a reciprocal interest in her.  Cullen privately wondered if the Warden was evaluating a potential conscript for when the threat was over.  Blackwall was a recruiter, after all, and the Grey Wardens preferred to draw their recruits from the ranks of those who had nothing left to lose.  

Magna would eventually face trial before the next Divine, but a Grey Warden conscription could spare her the hangman’s noose.  It might be the best resolution for everyone.  And so Cullen waited.

Watching Magna fight was, in itself, a thing of beauty.  Whoever had trained her in Ostwick had done a superb job.  Her stances were perfectly executed.  Her sense of balance was almost preternatural, even in heavy armor.  With the eye of a seasoned fighter himself, Cullen watched as she circled and struck, pivoted fluidly as she blocked the warden’s counterattack, and flowed right back into another blow.  Out of armor, she was reticent, uncertain, and harried.  When she picked up her shield, however, she became someone else.  He wondered, with fleeting regret, what it would have been like to have met her before the Conclave - as a sister templar and not a heretic.  

The match ended in a double kill, Magna landing a blow that would have sent her blade up through Blackwall’s unprotected underarm and into his heart just as his would have taken her head in a real fight.  The two combatants parted, huffing with exertion as they pulled off their helms.  Magna’s face was flushed and dripping with sweat despite the chilly mountain air, but her eyes were shining.

“Well done,” she panted, raising her arms up to the back of her neck to expand her chest and catch her breath for an instant.  “I didn’t expect you to recover the shield bash like that.  I should have blocked up instead of to the side.”

Her voice was animated, her expression relaxed and eager for once.  She even smiled as she straightened and clasped the warden’s forearm heartily - the universal gesture of goodwill between sparring partners.  Even with the twin scars on her chin, even sweaty from training, she was beautiful this way.  Alive.  Cullen felt his face color hotly as he noticed it, and quickly tried to shove the thought down and away.  He could not afford it.  She would not thank him for it.  Better not to go there at all.

“You went a hair too far off center,” Blackwall replied, equally engrossed in the analysis of the match as he shook out his limbs.  “If you’d have stepped in with it, you’d have had me off balance.  And I’d have deserved it for letting you get the drop on me with that low thrust.  I’ll have to remember that.”

“Do all Warden’s fight that well?  That’s the best round I’ve had in-”

Blackwall’s eyes slid past Magna to land on Cullen then and the warden nodded in his direction.  Magna turned, her eyes meeting his own for an instant before she looked away, her demeanor drawing quickly back downward and inward.  It was painful to see.

“Looks like you’ve got other business to attend to, my lady,” the Warden interrupted, but gently.  It was obvious that the big man knew there was tension and difficulty among the upper ranks.  He was trying to be diplomatic.  Blackwall shouldered his shield.  “We’ll work on that block later.”

He turned, acknowledging Cullen with a polite grunt of “commander” as he passed and headed back in the direction of the smithy.  Cullen watched him go for a moment, waiting until the warden was out of earshot before turning back to Magna.

She exhaled deeply as she brushed damp strands of hair out of her face.  Sheathing her weapon, she turned to face him, but would not look him directly in the eye.  He wished - well, Cullen wasn’t certain what he wished.  That things had been different?  That she was innocent, a willing party to the Inquisition, un-tortured, undamaged, so that they could be friends and not captor and captive?  That he could elicit from her the same beautiful smile that he had caught a glimpse of just now?  He smiled weakly at her himself.

“That was quite the match.  You put a lot of thought and dedication into your shieldwork.  It shows.”

“I have to stay sharp as long as there is work to be done,” she replied, vaguely, but the compliment seemed to have eased her defense a fraction.  “Did you need something from me, commander?”

“I’ve been meaning to find a moment to speak to you, to see how you’re coping, but we’ve had you busy of late.  I wondered if now might be a convenient moment.”

A pained expression crossed Magna’s face briefly, but she nodded her consent.  Cullen exchanged a nod with Lysette, Magna’s silent escort, nearby and the Ferelden templar remained behind as he walked with Magna towards the rocky slope down to the frozen shore of the lake where they could speak privately.

“I’ve heard good reports of your work at Redcliffe,” Cullen began, thinking quickly, trying to lead with something that would draw her out a little further while also sincerely wanting to praise what she had already done.  Even if she was an agent of the one who had caused all of this suffering, she did not have to help them.  “I’m relieved that the refugees are safer now.  I’m not sure that the Inquisition would have been able to save so many so quickly without your efforts.”

“It’s a worthy cause and I promised to save what lives I could.  I’m not entirely heartless.”

“I know you’re not.”

She glanced at him, as if to determine whether he meant it.  He did.  Whoever she served, however tangled and wrong her loyalties might have become, Cullen was certain of that much.

The sky over the Frostbacks was grey, casting a dull shade over the landscape, but the air was otherwise clear and still.  The small pier at the edge of the lake jutted out into thick blue ice.  Small boats were pulled up into winter moorings on the gravelly shore, their hulls turned towards the wintery clouds above.  Magna’s gaze turned upwards, too, and Cullen did not have to wonder what she was looking at.  

The Breach still loomed over the ruins of the Temple of Sacred Ashes, quiescent but ever present.  A reminder of the day that this had first began.  A reminder that he stood there with one of the perpetrators.

“Are you being treated well?” he asked her, awkwardly.  “Are they dispensing you enough lyrium for your missions?”

This had been a particular sticking point between him and Leliana.  They needed Magna in fighting shape for as long as she was willing to aid them.  That meant maintaining a working dose of lyrium, as they did with the Inquisition’s other templars.  But, the situation was more complicated than that.  It had become apparent in the first weeks of her tenure at Haven that Magna’s dependency on the substance was far more advanced than it should have been for a templar of her years.  Wherever she had been before this, she had been exposed for some time to far stronger, more frequent, and less refined doses of lyrium than was dispensed by the Chantry.  Receiving the standard preparation now kept her functional, but restless and uncomfortable.  More was needed, and the spymaster had seen an opportunity.

“A falcon hunts better when it is hungry, commander,” Leliana had told him in her haughty Orlesian way.  “Give her the minimum and only that when she is here at Haven.  Cassandra can judge her needs in the field.  Make her work for it.”

Cullen had been outraged - had the woman learned nothing? - but fortunately Cassandra had stepped in before he could lose his temper and had refused to play any further games with the former templar’s lyrium supply.  The Seeker had taken the lessons of the failed torture session to heart, and she understood better than her colleague what a templar suffered.  But still, he needed to make himself sure that all was well.

“Enough to work adequately,” Magna replied, a little stiffly, but there was conflict in her eyes when she glanced up at him.  Her expression softened a little. “I’m being treated better than I have a right to expect, commander.  I know that’s your doing.  Thank you.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Cullen told her, sincerely.  “No one can change what was done.  We can only try to do better.”

The younger templar said nothing, though Cullen could see her thinking, turning something over and over in her mind.  This was more than she had spoken to him in one sitting since he had met her.  He understood better than he would have liked to.  She was like a wounded mabari in a cage.  She would only bite and struggle if she was handled roughly - something that the spymaster did not seem to understand.  If he wanted to help her, he had to let her come to him.  And he had to give her a reason to try.

“You were a templar - a Knight-Commander, I heard.  Why did you leave the Order?” she asked him, finally.

It was a question that Cullen had asked himself many times and he was still uncertain that he had a satisfactory answer.  After Meredith’s madness and the chaos it brought down on the city of Kirkwall, he had been tired and angry and troubled.  The Order that he had joined as a young man had almost ceased to exist by that time.  He had left the Ferelden Circle broken and had put his trust in Meredith only to have it dashed once more, and then he had been left to pick up the pieces himself.  He had done his best, but it had felt an exercise in futility.

Trevelyan was studying him closely, waiting for his answer.  He could feel the weight that she would place on his reply, and so there could be no falsehoods, no concealing of the truth.  She would know instinctively.  She was still a templar, if a relatively young one.

“The Order in Kirkwall had disintegrated beyond repair after what happened to the previous Knight-Commander,” Cullen told her.  He saw her eyebrows lift slightly in recognition at the name of the city.  The Kirkwall Circle was famous for its harshness among the Order.  And there was no templar alive who did not know what had happened there.  “When the Inquisition approached me to command their armies, I knew that I could serve better here.  We’ve been stemming the symptoms of the conflict for too long without addressing the sickness at the heart of it.  And I was tired of the hypocrisy.  I wanted to be part of the solution.”

Magna took this in, her eyes searching his face, reading the veracity of his words.  He needed to keep her talking.  The opportunity might not come again.  Cullen stepped towards her a little, breaking his military posture for a moment to make it easier, to show her that this was not an official conversation.  This was personal - a conversation between two former templars and not between a general and an enemy prisoner.

“And you?  Why did you leave?”

He knew the basic facts.  She had gone out in pursuit of maleficar and had disappeared along with all of her squad without a trace, only to turn up a year later with a harrowing story of betrayal and escape.  It might even be mostly true, for all he knew.  But what had happened during the course of that year?  What had made a good and devoted young knight into an operative willing to murder the Divine as a party to some dark ritual?

He was certain that she would pull back again.  Up until now, she had refused to answer questions.  He had promised her that answers would not be required of her.  But, to his surprise, Magna’s face only creased with pain.  There was a raw edge to her normally steady voice when she spoke.

“I never did.  Not truly,” she confessed. “Not the true Order, anyway.”

It was a cryptic admission, but before Cullen could inquire further, she continued.

“I will always be a templar.  I will always honor my vows, all save one.  But I will never be a tool in unworthy hands again.  I would rather die.”

The fierce sincerity in the words was cutting.  Cullen felt them pierce him down to his heart.  Few templars could claim not to have entertained the same sentiments from time to time, especially in the last few years.  It captured the spirit of the age perfectly, the reason that so many had abandoned the Chantry to begin with.  It did not excuse the carnage and the destruction - but a slightly different turn of fate could have seen him standing in her place, and he knew it.

“And the cause you serve now - have they used you any better?”

The question left his lips before he had completely thought it through and Cullen cursed mentally, certain that he had blundered.  He waited to see Trevelyan retreat, as she always did, and was once again surprised when she did not.  She hung her head briefly before glancing sadly back up at the Breach.

“I never wanted this - any of this.  But I have to believe that it will come out right in the end, commander.  Just as you do.”

They stood and looked up at the Breach for a few quiet minutes, before Cullen felt able to speak again.

“We will need to approach either the rebel mages in Redcliffe or the Order soon to secure the power needed to close the Breach.  You were there with Cassandra when she spoke to the Lord Seeker and to that magister - Alexius - at Redcliffe.  Neither group will tolerate the presence of the other and so we cannot attempt to ally with both.  If it were given to you to decide, what would you choose?”

She almost laughed at that.  Magna’s lips turned up, though in more of a grimace than a smile.

“You’re asking me?  Why?”

“You will be the one through which the power will be channeled.  Your input is as good as any other,” Cullen replied, sensibly, and then conceded, “And, I confess, we are conflicted ourselves.  You’ve proven yourself capable - more than capable.  I wanted to give you a chance to be heard, if you have anything to say on the matter.”

“I could sabotage your efforts.  I could send you off on a wild nug hunt.  I’m a traitor, after all.   Aren't you concerned?”

This was said facetiously, however, and Cullen realized suddenly that he had won - at least the first battle of the war.  Magna no longer faced him with the rigidity of a recruit under inspection.  Having broken her silence, she seemed finally to relinquish it as a shield against him.  Her self-deprecating jibe was the parting shot.

“I suppose I will simply have to trust you,” he told her, smiling.

She considered the question seriously, the gravel crunching under her feet as she pondered.

“The mages,” she decided, finally.  “The Lord Seeker wants nothing to do with the Inquisition.  From a strategic position, you’ll likely give up more than you’ll gain in return if you pursue that route.  That’s _if_ he even agrees to entertain the idea.  If you leave them be, nothing is lost.  They’re not an active danger.  The mages, however, are - especially with a Tevinter magister at the helm now.  Their welcome with the King of Ferelden is likely to be wearing thin.  You don’t have a full complement of templars, but you might have enough to keep the worst problems at bay and you would kill three birds with one stone - close the Breach, remove the threat of a Tevinter incursion, remove or lessen the threat of unregulated mages.  And they need us as much as we need them.”

It was not the answer that he was hoping for, though he could not deny that her reasoning was sound.  Still, something in her statement caught Cullen’s attention in particular.

“Us?” he repeated, allowing his smile to broaden as he pointed out her turn of phrase.  She scowled - still an improvement over the silent, harrowed expression that it replaced.

“I will let the others know your thoughts.  We will have to move soon, in either case,” Cullen told her, as they walk back to the training field.  They had made progress enough to satisfy him for one day.  He did not want to spoil it.

A different assortment of soldiers was engaged in a shield-wall drill, admittedly not very well.  Magna stopped near her own corner of the field and watched them, a critical look on her face.  Cullen watched with her, more interested to see what she would do than the soldiers.

“Are they ever going to learn to keep their shields up?” she muttered under her breath as the first attempt to hold the line summarily disintegrated, and Cullen couldn’t help laughing at the exasperation in her voice, though he caught himself quickly.

“They will.  They haven’t had the benefit of a Knight-Corporal pounding them into the parade grounds until they learned like we did.  Unless you’re volunteering?”

The half-annoyed glance that she threw at him would not have been out of place on Cassandra’s face.  But he could feel a little more of the tension between them slip.  And that was no bad thing.

Cullen took his leave, glancing back over his shoulder to see Magna pick up her shield from where she had left it leaning against a training dummy.  There was a part of him that could not help but admire her.  More than a small part of him, admittedly.  The more he learned of her, the more he thought about her, the more he was determined to win her over.  The Inquisition needed people like her.  She, although she did not yet realize it, needed what the Inquisition could provide her - a chance to redeem herself, a means of restoring the faith that she had clearly lost.  Just as he had.

He would discuss it with Cassandra when he went to deliver Magna’s assessment of the situation with the mages.  The Seeker, too, was beginning to soften toward their prisoner.  There had to be a way.

 

~~0~~

 

If escape was to be possible, the time was swiftly approaching.  Magna walked the circuit of Haven’s single road restlessly, sorry for the younger templar that was tasked with following her, but still unable to be still.  All of the meditations and exercises in discipline that she had always sought refuge in had failed to calm the building anxiety inside of her and so she resorted to physical activity to wear herself down.

It was partially due to the lyrium, she knew.  They had finally found a dose and a schedule that would roughly match what she had received among the Red Templars, but it was not the same.  The lyrium itself was different.  It quelled the hunger, but only just.  Work made it fade for a while, but her body had limits.  She had given up the habit of prayer when she had joined the Red Templars, but the last long hours before her next philter saw her on her knees once more, sublimating her need into the familiar phrases of the Chant even as she knew no one was listening.

It was not only the lyrium, however.  Plans were being made for the journey to Redcliffe to coax the mages there into an alliance with the Inquisition.  The Breach required more power than Magna could provide to close.  The mages had it.  That they were now being led by a Tevinter magister was a problem for the Inquisition.  And for Magna, though for entirely different reasons.

From the instant she had met Alexius, Magna had been certain that he knew precisely who she was.  In her travels on behalf of the Red Templars and as Samson’s chief officer, she had met other servants of Corypheus and the Tevinter magister had all of the earmarks of a creature of the Elder One.  His presence made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle in the same way that Corphyeus’ strange mage-soldiers had when she had first seen the ancient magister months before.  Venatori.  The other two mages that had approached her in Redcliffe to warn her - Dorian and Alexius’ son Felix - had as good as confirmed it for her.  

 _Whatever he has done, he has done to get to you_ , Dorian had said.

When Cullen had asked her opinion on which side they should ally with, she had been torn.  From a practical point of view, she would have preferred the templars for much the same reasons that she suspected Cullen himself did.  There was immense power in a full complement of templars.  She did not have the hatred and suspicion of mages that many of her brothers did, but Magna instinctively reviled the idea of letting mages - apostates, at that - channel their magic through her.

But she was not a member of the Inquisition.  And what was practical for them could not matter in the face of the obligations she owed elsewhere.

Though her memories were muddled, she had gone to the Conclave ignorant of everything but her small part in the ritual.  After the events at Redcliffe, she had begun to piece together an idea of what had been at stake.  The Mark was what the Elder One had been after to begin with.  It would allow him to pass into the Fade.  Since she had wound up with the Mark instead, if Alexius was here for her and not merely to influence the mages to the Elder One’s side, then he had likely been tasked either to recover her or to recover the Mark from her.  She had seen too much by now to believe that her life would be spared in the process.

Before she had left Samson to travel to Ostwick in preparation for the Conclave, he had discussed his own plans with her.  It was time for the Templar Order to be assimilated into the fold.  Just as she had her mission, he would be traveling east to begin his.  Even if there was no magister waiting for her in Redcliffe, Magna could not send the Inquisition to Therinfal Redoubt and endanger Samson and his work there.  Her brethren had suffered too much for this already and, though she had failed at the Conclave, she would not fail Samson again.  Not for the Inquisition.  Not to spare her own life a little longer.  And that only left her one choice.

Magna stalked through the gates and out to the training field.  She needed to burn off some of her anxious energy.  To fear death was normal.  The Knight-Corporal who had trained her class of recruits had once told her that a templar who did not feel fear could not be trusted.  Fear was a sign of humanity, and courage was not the absence of the fear but the understanding that there was something more important than herself.  As she set up the pell to begin her shield drills, she recalled the conversation and tried to let the memory soothe her.  But it was not only herself that she was afraid for.

The Inquisition’s leadership was not foolish.  They suspected a trap was laid for them at Redcliffe.  So far, Magna knew she had done an adequate job of pretending ignorance.  Her silence these last few weeks had been the right tactic to take after all.  They had decided to send Magna with the Seeker anyway as bait for Alexius.  She did not know the details of the plot, but Cullen had assured her that they had every intention of protecting her.

“We wouldn’t send you into danger without a plan,” the former templar had said.  “Follow Cassandra’s lead.”

Things had been different between her and the Inquisition’s commander since their discussion at the lake.  His concern for her well-being and his honesty had touched her, though she had struggled not to show it.  Though she missed the company of other templars, she could not bring herself to speak to the few who remained with the Inquisition.  Her crimes had been kept a secret from all but the inner circle, but the others seemed to know that she was set apart - one to be watched rather than a watcher now.  Shame kept her from facing them, but Cullen went out of his way to breach the silence.  Against her wishes, she had grown to like the man.  She regretted already that she had had to betray his trust by sending the Inquisition’s efforts towards Redcliffe.  But what else could she do?

“You’re leaning too far back,” a voice said behind her as Magna practiced her shield bash, sending the pell spinning with a blow from her shield, striking at the center, and catching the rebound on the other side.  She was having difficulty with the catch.  Something in her delivery was off kilter.  She paused, breathing hard from the effort, to see Blackwall approaching her.  Another of the Inquisition’s members that made her predicament all the harder.

She had come to a working relationship with all of the Inquisition’s inner circle - even those, like Grand Enchanter Vivienne, whom she did not like and tried to avoid - but Blackwall she had become friends with despite herself.  The Warden was one of the best fighters she had ever seen.  She looked forward to their sparring matches.  Working over a technique with him allowed her to step outside of herself for a little while and simply be a professional soldier  talking to a fellow professional.  For his part, Blackwall treated her with courtesy and camaraderie.  He knew at least a little of her circumstances, but he was the first to admit that few Wardens could claim to be saints, too.  What mattered to him was what she was doing now - a position that, until now, Magna had found comforting.

The scruffy Warden smiled at her in a friendly way.  He was out of armor, though he always wore his thick green gambeson, and he did not carry his shield.  When they were at Haven and he was not helping with the recruits, he seemed to spend most of his time around the smithy outside of the walls, so perhaps he had seen her emerge from the village and had simply come to say hello.

“You’re stepping in a little bit too far, which leaves your stance too wide.  It’s throwing your balance and taking some of the power out of the bash.”

Magna looked at her feet, confirming that the Warden was right.  Her nerves were having more of an effect on her than she had thought.  Disgusted with the simplicity of the error, she corrected herself.

“Thanks.  I’m having trouble feeling it today.”

“You work yourself too hard.  Makes you start second guessing your body instead of letting it do what you’ve trained it to do.”

He was right, Magna had to admit.  Her trainers had told her as much when she was still a young recruit.  Dedication and diligence were one thing; running herself into the ground was another.  She relaxed, standing at ease as she let her shield arm drop to her side.  Blackwall gestured to the nearby rocks and she lay her shield aside with a sigh, taking a seat.  He sat down next to her.

“So, what’s bothering you?” he asked, catching Magna off guard.  The Warden glanced at her, amused at the obvious surprise on her face.  He chuckled at her discomfort.  “You templars are good at keeping a straight face, but I was already a soldier when you were picking up your first wooden trainer.  A swordswoman of your skill doesn’t make those kind of mistakes unless something is on her mind.”

She couldn’t tell him the truth.  If there was anyone around her here that she could trust, it would be Blackwall, but this was beyond the bounds of friendship.  As tolerant as the Warden was, she could not expect him to keep her plans secret if she confessed the truth.  He, like the others, stood on the opposite side of her in this.  But she respected him too much to lie.  She shrugged.

“I’m anxious for this all to be over, I suppose.  Redcliffe.  The Breach.  It wears on me.  I’m ready to see it done.”

It was not entirely untrue.  And Blackwall seemed to accept her answer at face value.

“Can’t say I haven’t felt the same,” he told her.  He regarded her seriously.  “Are you worried about what will happen afterward?”

It was the most personal question he had asked her to date.  They normally avoided the subject.  What good could come of bringing it up?  But he was trying to help her, and Magna felt her heart sink.  He meant the trial and possible execution she would face as a mass murderer and a traitor to the Order and the Chantry when the Breach was sealed.  If it ever came to that, she would deserve it.  But it was a different end, much nearer to hand, that she was concerned about.

“I accepted my fate a long time before now,” she admitted to him, though they were no longer talking about the same thing.  “At least it will be done with.  I’m willing to die for my convictions.  I just - I wish -”

Magna could hear the bitterness in her own voice as it broke, cutting off the words that she could not bring herself to say as well as the words that she could not allow herself to say.  The Warden waited, silently, as she tried to pull herself back together.

“It doesn’t have to end that way,” he told her, when her breathing had returned to normal.  “There’s no one here that wants you dead - not after all the work you’ve done.  You made a bad choice.  Doesn’t matter why.  People died and you have to live with that, but you’re not dead yet.  You can start over.  Try a better way.  Make it right.  It’s not too late for you.”

“Are you trying to recruit me, Warden?” Magna asked, forcing a smile that required too much effort, but Blackwall only chuckled.

“Maybe.  When we get back from Redcliffe, we’ll talk about that.  I’m not above conscripting you if I have to, but let’s see how it goes.”

Another stab of pain.  She had almost forgotten that Blackwall and Varric would be accompanying her and Seeker Cassandra into Redcliffe Castle, along with the Teviner mage Dorian, who had shown up out of the blue a few days before.  If she surrendered herself to Alexius, allowed him to take her or the Mark or whatever he had been sent to do, then she would be bound to turn and stand against whoever had come with her.  

Magna was not concerned about the mage.  He had involved himself in the Inquisition’s affairs of his own volition and he would suffer the least risk at the hands of his former mentor.  Alexius could deal with Dorian however he chose.  The Seeker would die, there was no question about that.  Magna took no pleasure at the thought of it, but she could feel no remorse either.  Not after what had happened to her below the Chantry.  But Blackwall and Varric - they had never been anything but kind to her.  She did not want to see them die.  She did not want it to be her blade that did it.

“Blackwall,” she began, trying to find a way to warn him off that would not give away her plans, “if I asked you a favor, would you do it?”

“Depends on the favor,” he replied, but he was listening.

“Don’t go to Redcliffe.  You or Varric.  Sit this one out.”

From the way his head tilted, from his hesitation, she knew that he was suspicious.

“Is something going to happen there?”

Magna could feel his eyes boring into her and she could not make herself look at him.  She had never been a good liar.  She had never thought to be in a situation where she would have to be.  It had been bad enough in Ostwick, when she had had to go through the motions, pretending to be a loyal Circle templar all over again in order to position herself where she needed to be.  This was far, far worse.

“I don’t know.  It’s a feeling.  A twitch in my shield arm that tells me it might go bad this time.  Templar intuition.  Humor me this once.”

Her answer did not satisfy.  She could feel it.  The Warden shifted beside her.

“Look me in the eye and tell me that again.”

She tried.  She summoned every last ounce of her mettle, every last memory that reminded her what was at stake.  Magna lifted her head miserably and looked into Blackwall’s grey eyes - and found that she could say nothing.

“I’m going to Redcliffe,” the Warden told her, gruffly, in a tone that brooked no further discussion.  “Do what you have to do.  Just make sure that it’s what you want.”

He left her sitting there, watching his retreating back as he strode back towards the smithy, and Magna bent forward to bury her face into her hands.  She had always known that her life would be a difficult one from the moment she had accepted the first philter.  But the pain kept coming and coming and nothing she ever did seemed to make it abate.  

 _Sometimes the right thing is harder than it should be_ , Samson had told her on the night before she left on this mission.  He was right.  He had been right from the beginning.  She would have to bear it.  That was why she had been chosen - because she was strong, because she was his best.  She couldn’t break.  Not for Varric.  Not for Blackwall.  Not for Cullen.

But death, she thought as she settled down to her meditations later that evening, would be a relief when it came afterwards.


	5. Knight in Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had quite a bit written up while I was working on getting the last few chapters to work to my satisfaction, so I'll just be posting essentially whenever I have time to do the final edits. I'm glad so many people are enjoying this story so much. Thanks for reading!

 

The road to Redcliffe seemed longer than it had on previous journeys.  Cassandra rode at the forefront, but her thoughts drifted to those behind her.  A tense mood had settled onto the Inquisition party.  Even Varric, normally the talkative one, seemed to have been affected by it.  He and Blackwall exchanged some half-hearted speculation about the upcoming Grand Melee, but it was stilted and they, too, settled into silence eventually.  Dorian chose to keep his self-preening comments and witticisms to himself for once.

Trevelyan had become almost a ghost of a woman over the course of the last few days.  Cassandra had observed that the young templar was calmer, more at ease, and more tractable in the company of the dwarf and the Grey Warden - it was why she had suggested them as companions on this venture over any of the others - but Trevelyan seemed to pull further away even from her friends the closer they came to their destination.  She had barely spoken since leaving Haven.  She slept badly.  She ate little.  Cassandra could say nothing to her - Trevelyan was otherwise compliant and presented no resistance to commands at all.  But, she noticed.  And she watched.

Blackwall also seemed to be on his guard.  She could see him watching Trevelyan, too, when he thought no one else was looking.  He was waiting for something.  What?  The Warden could tell her nothing that Cassandra did not already know: something about this mission had spooked the templar.  Perhaps it was only nerves.  She was not pleased, herself, to be walking into an obvious trap. But Magna was as stalwart as any templar or Seeker Cassandra had ever seen.  If there was anything there, she supposed they would find out soon enough.

On the last night before reaching Redcliffe, Trevelyan was restless.  The others snored in their bedrolls, but Cassandra - suspecting an escape attempt - lay awake.  She watched as Trevelyan tossed and turned and finally sat up.

The fallen templar’s forehead shone with sweat in the dim, guttering light of the campfire.  She leaned her face into her hands, her lips moving swiftly and almost soundlessly.  Straining, Cassandra could catch a little of the whispered words.

 _“. . .Though all before me is shadow, yet shall the Maker be my guide.  I shall not be left to wander the drifting roads of the Beyond.  For there is no darkness in the Maker's Light and nothing that He has wrought shall be lost . . ._ ”

It was strange and more than a little surprising to hear the words of the Chant on Trevelyan’s lips.  And the choice of the verse was telling.  It was a common prayer among Templars and Seekers alike - among all of those whose lives could easily be lost in service of the Maker.  Cassandra listened, letting the vehemence of Trevelyan’s delivery tell her what she wanted to know.

“. . . _I am not alone.  Even as I stumble upon the path with my eyes closed, yet I see the Light is here_. . .”

The final verse of the prayer seemed to come with greater difficulty.

“ _Draw your last breath, my friends.  Cross the Veil and the Fade and all of the stars in the sky.  Rest at the Maker’s right hand and_ \- and . . .”

Trevelyan choked upon the words, her breath drawing in sharply in a soft gasp.

“And be forgiven,” Cassandra finished for her.  

The templar flinched visibly, her back straightening guiltily as if she had been caught at something forbidden.  Quietly, so as not to wake the others, Cassandra pushed herself up from her bedroll until she, too, was sitting.  Now that Trevelyan knew that she was awake, there was no point in pretending.

“I did not think that you would still pray.”

“I don’t,” Trevelyan hissed, almost angrily.  The insistence in her voice would have been amusing, if the circumstances around them had not been so serious.  Cassandra waited.  The templar shook her head, frowning, as if to clear it.  She added, curtly: “I didn’t leave my training behind me.  The cadence of the words makes it easier.”

“The lyrium?” Cassandra asked, carefully noting the small changes in the other woman’s expression.  “Or what you are seeking forgiveness for?”

She had managed to catch Trevelyan in a weak moment, at last.  All of her training and experience in interrogation confirmed it. Her prisoner had withstood phenomenal pressure up to now - she was still resistant, even sitting there shivering with the force of whatever was inside of her - but something had finally pushed the templar close to the point of breaking.  All it would take was the right stimulus, the right words.

“We’re winning her over.  Slowly, but I can see it,” Cullen had told her on the night they had all agreed to put their backing behind the mages.  

They had stood on the promontory in front of the chantry, watching Haven settle in for the night as the watch made their first rounds of the evening.  Though she suspected that Cullen’s stake in the prisoner was less objective and more personal now, Cassandra had agreed.  Trevelyan was not the monster that she had initially appeared to be.  She had courage, a sense of decency and self-sacrifice in the face of her own suffering.  That demanded respect.  It was exactly what the Inquisition had needed when they had needed it.  Providence in the most unexpected form.

“You know her best,” she had told the commander in the end.  “When the Breach is sealed, I would see her put under your command instead of taking her to Val Royeaux to await the Chantry’s judgement.  If we cannot afford to be merciful, then we are no better than our predecessors.  If you can remind her of what she was - what she could still be - I would prefer to see her repent as a templar than die as a heretic.”

Trevelyan was silent.  Her head bowed; her shoulders tensed as she flexed her fists.  When she spoke again, her voice was calm and flat - though Cassandra was not fooled.  She could hear the hurt behind the words.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you,” the templar apologized stiffly and lay back down, turning on her bedroll so that her back was to Cassandra.

Trevelyan would, perhaps, never trust her.  Cassandra was prepared to accept this - she had brought it upon herself.  That did not mean that she could not try to be worthy of it regardless.  Silently, she stretched back out on her own mat.  Trevelyan’s body - only a few feet away - grew still at last.  As she closed her eyes, she lifted up a silent prayer of her own.

_The one who repents, who has faith, unshaken by the darkness of the world - she shall know true peace._

She could only hope that the Maker would grant it be so.  For Magna, eventually, as well as for herself.

 

~~0~~

 

After his hectic years as a mercenary, Blackwall had thought he had seen everything.  After the Breach, he had been certain that nothing would ever be able to shock him again.  As was so often the case in his life, he had been wrong.

“So, Hero, you’re a betting man,” Varric said to him as they walked up to Redcliffe Castle, far enough behind the Seeker and Trevelyan that he would not be heard.  “You want to lay odds on whether this is a setup?”

The day was bright, the sky clear, but the castle loomed threatening up before them.  A masterwork of defensive engineering, it was the most formidable fortress in southern Thedas.  Once they were inside there would be no easy way back out.

“It’s definitely a setup,” Blackwall replied, as his eyes flicked to Magna in front of him.

Their last conversation at Haven had unsettled him.  She knew something.  She was too much the good soldier to let it slip - even to him, though they had become friends - but she had known that something terrible was waiting at Redcliffe and she had begged him not to go and to tell Varric the same.  It was a hopeful sign to see in the Inquisition’s captive Herald - an affirmation that she was as good on the inside as he believed her to be - but taking her advice would only have put another man or woman in danger and too many people had died in his place already.  And, if the Breach itself was not enough to hold her to the right path, then he would give her another reason.  So, Blackwall had turned it back on her.  It was easier to kill when your enemy was an abstraction, when you didn’t have to know or care who he was.  For Magna to betray the Inquisition - if that was indeed what she planned - then she would have to look Blackwall in the eye and choose to draw her steel on him, too, as she did it.  He had hoped then, as he fervently did now, that it would be enough to break her resolve in the end.

“And our templar friend?” the dwarf continued, raising an eyebrow.   

Varric wasn’t stupid, either.  He had taken a liking to Magna for much the same reasons that Blackwall himself had, but he also had no illusions about who she was.  Blackwall had warned the dwarf - it was only fair - but Varric had decided to take the job anyway.  It wasn’t the first time he and Bianca had strolled into a trap, he had said, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Three to one, our side,” Blackwall predicted, with far less confidence on the inside than he pretended to Varric.  In truth, he suspected that the odds were more against them than that.  Loyalty was a powerful thing and how Magna’s were divided now was anyone’s guess.  But, he would not bet against her.  He would believe in her up until the moment she proved him wrong.  She had earned that much.  “Twenty crowns.”

“I hope you’re right,” Varric murmurred dubiously as they approached the gatehouse.  “But, the way things are going right now?  I’ll take that.”

The scene inside of the great hall would not have been out of place in one of the dwarf’s melodramatic adventure stories.  The magister waited in front of the large hearth, poised in between the snarling heads of two wooden mabari statues.  Blackwall counted the strange masked soldiers who flanked them.  They were only outnumbered four to one.  He was relatively certain that he could take his four, if the Seeker could handle the magister.  Varric had his crossbow.  They might be able to hold the hall for - oh - ten minutes.  Long enough for the rest of the force outside to cut off their exits.  That was, unless Trevelyan herself turned on them.

He had used their sparring exercises in part to study her fighting style, noting the small flaws in her technique and how they could be exploited.  She was younger and quicker than him, better trained on the whole, but he had a decade of experience on her and a broader repertoire.  If push came to shove, he could probably take her down - but it would be a close thing.  They were evenly matched.  He had never wanted to fight her in earnest.  He still hoped that he would not have to.

He had never been a praying man, but Blackwall’s eyes burned into the back of Magna’s head in front of him now as he repeated the same phrase in his mind and willed her to hear it from the force of his conviction alone.

_Don’t make me kill you._

“The Inquisition needs mages to seal the Breach, and I happen to have them.  What do you have to offer in return, I wonder?” the magister asked once the pleasantries were concluded, smiling like a cat with a mouse as he settled himself down onto his stolen arl’s throne and steepled his fingers.

The man’s eyes had fixated on Magna immediately from the instant they had all entered the hall.  Similarly, Blackwall had noticed the way that her body had stiffened under the Tevinter’s gaze.  This wasn’t about the Redcliffe mages.  This was about Magna herself.  She had known it from the beginning.

_Don’t make me kill you._

“The Inquisition has many resources, I’m certain-” the Seeker began, but was interrupted.  Magna’s voice rang out strong and steady.

“He’s toying with you.  The mages are just the bait.  Alexius is here for me.”

“What?” Grand Enchanter Fiona gasped from the side of the hall.

“Shit,” Varric cursed softly from Blackwall’s right.  If Blackwall’s wager turned out wrong, they would never have a chance to settle up anyway.  

The magister’s unctuous smile became strained, but it did not dissipate.  Magna did not move an inch, even as the Seeker stepped away from her, looking between her and the magister with growing alarm.

“Very observant of you, Ser Trevelyan,” Alexius acknowledged, warmly. “You possess something that was meant for your betters.  The Elder One sent me to retrieve it from you.  I trust that your time with the Inquisition has not made you forget what you owe to your master?”

There was an upturn in the magister’s voice at the word “master” that made Blackwall’s blood run cold.  This was what Magna had been trying to tell him.  This was what had eaten away at her on the road to Redcliffe - the anticipation of this moment.  His hand moved nearer his sword.  At any moment, he knew, she would turn to face him.  And they would not be sparring this time.

 _Don’t make me kill you_.

“You knew,” Cassandra accused, her face livid, her voice going cold with righteous anger as she glared at Magna.  “This whole time - you knew.”

“I know what’s required of me,” the templar told the magister without flinching, as if she and the man on the dais were the only two people in the room.  Cassandra’s words seemed to glance off of her like arrows striking heavy plate armor.  Blackwall’s heart dropped into his stomach.  Her voice was calm.  She had already resigned herself.  He gripped his sword, sweat dripping down his spine beneath his plate and gambeson as he waited for the dreaded moment.

_Don’t make me kill you._

“Then do your duty, templar.”  The command was almost a dismissal.  Alexius knew that he had won.

“No,” Magna replied.

A roaring silence echoed through the hall.  In the corner of his vision, Blackwall could see Cassandra’s mouth fall open in surprise.  The templar took a step forward towards the magister.  The shield on her back caught the light of the torches, making the flaming sword of the Order etched into its surface gleam in the dim light of the hall.  The fabric of her red sash and purple surcoat rustled in the draft.  The magister sat up in his chair, his expression drawing down into a furious frown, incredulous.

“This was my failing.  I should be the only one to pay the penalty,” Magna told him, pitching her voice loud enough that there could be no mistaking what she had said.  “Grant the agents of the Inquisition safe passage back to Haven.  Allow them to evacuate the mages.  Do this, and I will lay my sword down.  I will submit willingly to whatever I must.”   

“No! We cannot seal the Breach without you,” the Seeker exclaimed.

“You dare to bargain with me?” the magister demanded, hotly, rising.  “You, who stole the Anchor - you, who failed your god?”

Magna had firmly planted herself between Alexius and the rest of the Inquisition party now.  Blackwall felt his heart hammering against his breastplate, both with the relief of realizing that his faith in her had been justified after all and the fear that he was about to watch her die anyway.  She might be willing to sacrifice herself - she might see it as the only way to obey her obligations and save their lives at the same time - but Magna was one of them now, a member of the Inquisition, whether she accepted it or not.  They could not leave her behind.

“I’m only one templar, mage.”  Trevelyan’s voice hardened until it could have shattered diamond.  A thousand years of unbreakable fortitude, generations of templars shouting down through the Ages, seemed conjured into her voice.  “And my life is forfeit already.  But I will take more than the Mark with me if you force me to fight here.  I swear it.  Let them go.”

What happened next was a blur for Blackwall.  He remembered the messy, agonized sounds of throats being slit and the clash of armored soldiers dropping to the stones as the Inquisition’s hidden agents appeared.  He remembered the mage Dorian, pushing forward to stand alongside Magna, and the magister’s own son turning to reason with his father.  He remembered the singing of steel as blades were drawn and the twisted desperation on Alexius’ face as the magister raised an amulet that crackled with sinister, roiling energy.

“You should never even have existed!” Alexius roared at Magna above the fray.

There was the brilliant flash.  The last thing Blackwall saw before the light blinded him, completely whiting out his vision, was Magna.  Her dark shape was silhouetted by the spell, haloed in hideous green even as blue fire like a lightning strike erupted from her skin, sending a soundless shockwave through the room..

And then, somehow, it was over.

Alexius backed away, horrorstruck, finally collapsing to his knees as the green vortex of his magic snapped out of existence and Magna strode through the acrid, electric air towards him.  Her sword was drawn at her side and Blackwall’s breath caught, certain that she was about to cut the magister down.  Instead, she stopped, shoulders heaving with effort, before Alexius’ kneeling form.  Her face was a mask so terrible in its furious anguish that it made the hairs on the back of Blackwall’s neck stand on end.

“You’re done here,” she told the crouching magister from between clenched teeth, her voice as cold as the winds at Haven.  Alexius deflated completely underneath her burning gaze, as his son moved quickly to his side.

Magna turned sharply to stalked back down from the dais into the center of the hall, but she stumbled, her left leg collapsing beneath her.  Blackwall rushed forward, catching her under the arm, and felt Cassandra do the same on the other side, propping up the templar.  

There had been no clash of weapons in the hall, but there was blood coating Magna’s armor.  A rend had opened in her chainmaille at the gap between the tasset plates on her hip and her cuirass.  Fresh blood oozed up through the mail whenever she shifted her weight.  There was a cut down to the bone on her cheek that wept red down her neck and soaked the padding under her gorget.  Her face was as pale as death.  The Seeker scrambled for a healing potion as the Inquisition’s soldiers dragged the magister away.

Outside the castle, help had finally arrived.  Arl Teagan’s petition to the King had not gone unanswered.  A regiment of Ferelden soldiers and knights had taken the village, preparing for a siege that was no longer needed.  King Alistair himself - one of the Grey Wardens who had stopped the Blight, Blackwall remembered with no little bit of awe - had arrived to lay claim to the castle.  And, after the mages had abetted the first Tevinter invasion of Ferelden in a hundred years, he was no longer in a mood to compromise.

Grand Enchanter Fiona had lept forward to lend what aid she could as soon as Magna’s mysterious injuries had become apparent.  When the King had delivered his edict of banishment, the aging elven woman’s face had fallen and her eyes had turned to the agents of the Inquisition - to Magna herself.  A new red scar seamed the templar’s face from ear to jaw as she turned her hard green gaze towards the head of the mage rebellion.  

“I have no authority to argue terms with you,” Magna had told the former Grand Enchanter stiffly. “You’ll either help us seal the Breach or you won’t.  I don’t care whether you come as willing allies or as exiles with nowhere else to go.  But if you choose to sit on your hands while the world dies, that will be by your own choice.  We will find another way.  And the world will remember, when the time comes.  Take it or leave it.”

It was not an answer that made anyone happy.  But it was a good answer nonetheless.  The mages marched from Redcliffe at dawn the next day with Magna at the head of the column, silent and stone-faced.  The Seeker rode next to her, equally restrained.

“So,” Varric began as he and Blackwall guided their mounts along behind their somber comrades, “I guess I owe you on that bet.  What did we say?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Blackwall told him.  The sky, except the part over the Frostback mountains, was blue and clear.  There was a breeze off of the peaks that carried the smell of fresh snow.  He was alive.  They were all alive - including Magna.  That was enough.  “Buy me the biggest tankard of ale they’ve got when we get back home and we’ll call it even.”

“You and me both,” the dwarf replied with an amused chuckle.  

They rode in silence for a few moments longer and then Blackwall saw Varric tilt his head, appraisingly.

“Odds on who flips the biggest lid when we get back to Haven with a bunch of unsupervised mages and no plan?”

“Commander Cullen, by a landslide.  30 crowns.”

“You’re on.  My money’s on Cassandra.  Just look at her up there.  You could fry an egg on that armor.”

“I heard that, Varric,” the Seeker snapped, turning her head slightly to cast a glare over her shoulder.

Blackwall smiled as the dwarf lifted his hands in a placatory gesture.  In a few days, they would be back at Haven.  Home.  If all went well, the sky would be closed again.  Magna would need help coming to terms with the past she had now decidedly walked away from.  He would stand at her back while she put herself back together.  As best he could, along with many others, he would make sure that there was a future ahead of her efforts - whatever that was going to look like.

The Herald of Andraste had finally joined the Inquisition.  At last.

 

~~0~~

 

The Breach was sealed.

Cullen looked out over the village of Haven, its dirt tracks crowded with soldiers, workers, and mages moving around each other, celebrating the Inquisition’s victory with ale and song.  There was dancing in the main square.  The smell of good food filled the air along with the smoke of numerous cookfires.  The torchlight burned bright on exhilarated faces despite the deepening cold of the evening.  A storm was brewing among the peaks to the northwest, he could see the clouds building behind the mountains,  but the Inquisition and its people needed a moment to take a breath and toast to the first of what they all hoped would be many successes to come.

From all accounts, Magna’s performance at Redcliffe Castle had been nothing short of miraculous.  He had thought Varric’s retelling an egregious exaggeration until the facts had been confirmed by Seeker Cassandra and Warden Blackwall.  It was true, Magna had led them there with the intention to surrender herself to an agent of her master - this Elder One.  That had been an oversight on their part.  In the end, however, she had made herself a shield to protect the lives of her Inquisition comrades and she had triumphed.  He wasn't pleased that the mages were essentially ungoverned, but it was too late now and the mages had accepted the presence of his templars with no argument so far. They all owed the success of the venture, almost entirely, to Magna.

But the woman that they had sent to Redcliffe was not the same woman that had returned to them.  From the instant Cullen had seen her face as she rode into the muddy stable yard, he had known that something was wrong. There was a deep, fresh scar on her cheek, marring her once perfect features.  Her green eyes seemed vacant, her gaze turned inward with an abiding and focused anger that was intimidating to behold. She had always been taciturn, but this was a deeper silence - the charging of the air before the lightning strike, the quiet that fell over the front lines before the battle charge.

It was Dorian’s account of the incident at Redcliffe that began to fill in the gaps in the story.  What had seemed at face value to be a failure of the Magister’s spell under Magna’s quickly timed dispel was in fact much more complicated.  The Tevinter mage had explained to the Inquisition leadership how Alexius had intended to remove Magna from the flow of time, making it so that she could never have received the Mark at the Conclave.  The already unstable magic had been disrupted and he and Magna had been thrown forward a year into the future instead, finding themselves in the desolate wreckage of a dying world under the heel of the Elder One.  They had fought their way back by defeating that future version of Alexius and using the amulet to return to the exact moment of their departure.  

Cullen scarcely found it believable, but the details lined up.  It explained the grievous injuries that Magna had seemed to sustain in the blink of an eye.  It explained the sudden and drastic change in her demeanor and the radical shift in her priorities.  Whatever had happened, she had emerged from the incident ferociously dedicated to sealing the Breach as quickly as possible.

Since returning, Magna had remained in her quarters unless she was directly summoned.  She would see no one, not Blackwall or Varric or even Cullen himself unless he sent for her officially.  She responded to questions with as few words as possible or not at all.  Her meals went uneaten.  Whatever she had seen in that future hellscape had left an indelible stamp on her.  When Cullen looked into her eyes, it was like seeing her in the prison cell beneath the chantry all over again, but worse.  The flame of hope in her that he had been feeding the last few weeks seemed to have been snuffed out completely.

Cassandra was concerned.  She had suggested postponing the ritual at the summit to give Trevelyan time to rest after the ordeal.  Caution was needed.  They were pushing her endurance too hard, the Seeker had said, though Magna herself would have none of it.  Even the mercenary captain Iron Bull felt obliged to mention the change.  Before they had ascended to the Temple for the final attempt to seal the sky, the Qunari had dropped by the army camp with a warning.

“Your Herald’s a tough one,” Bull had told Cullen, his scarred face and dark eye sober. “But any shield breaks if you hit it hard enough and long enough.  I’m just saying - you might want to keep an eye on her afterwards if this works out up there.  I know that look.  We lost a lot of good soldiers that way up in Seheron.”

It was a grave prediction and Cullen had taken the mercenary’s words to heart.  Although Magna was no longer under guard - no one in the council questioned what side she was on any longer - he had looked out for her as much as he could and, privately, he had asked the spymaster to have her agents discretely do the same.

“Commander Cullen,” a low voice said nearby, interrupting his thoughts.  Cullen turned away from the spectacle of celebration in the village to find one of the green-cowled scouts standing behind him.  The young man was not one he recognized, but he tried not to spend too much time puzzling out Leliana’s activities and personnel.  She rotated her people so often that it was impossible to keep up with them anyway.  The scout pressed a fist quickly to his chest in salute.  “Sister Nightingale told us to inform you directly if - well, you’d best come and see, ser.”

His pulse quickening with concern, Cullen followed the agent through the throng of revelers towards the south-facing side of the chantry.

“The Herald is through here.  I didn’t disturb her - we were told not to.  But she’s been at it for an hour now, ser.  She’ll freeze out here.”

The scout led him down a narrow path that flanked the chantry wall, sliding effortlessly and noiselessly past through thick curtains of spruce branches.  Cullen tried to move as soundlessly as his guide, but he was taller and his armor heavier.  Finally, the scout stopped him with a raised hand and a finger to the lips - the signal for quiet.  He looked out into the clearing in front of them.

The woods around the Haven chantry were dotted with small meditation gardens and pathways, most of them only sparsely tended.  Before the disaster, it had been a retreat for pilgrims visiting the Temple of Sacred Ashes.  The open space that Cullen found himself peering into was covered with snow and backed by a steep wall of natural rock into which a relief of Andraste had been carved in some long past Age.  Icicles hung from the Bride of the Maker’s fingers, her stone arms eternally outstretched in the classical pose of exhortation or adoration.  Her face was serene, smiling, the eyes gazing ever so slightly upward.  Kneeling at the base of the statue, head bowed against the hilt of a sword, was a woman.  Magna.

She was unarmored.  Loose blonde hair streamed unbound down the back of her leather surcoat.  The garment was too thin to offer much protection against the cold.  Despite this, she was perfectly still in her position of prayer.

“Leave us,” Cullen whispered to the scout.  He waited until the soft sound of the man’s retreat faded away and pondered what to do next.

He did not want to interrupt what might be a watershed moment of repentance, but the scout was right to be worried.  It was a cold night and only getting colder.  There would be more snow before long if the dark clouds overhead were any indication and the wind was beginning to pick up, rustling the trees.  Attired as she was, Magna could easily catch frostbite or worse in the deep chill.

Moments ticked by as Cullen tried to formulate the right way to speak without startling her, but before he could gather himself to do it, Trevelyan rose on her own.

Her breath steamed in the dim moonlight that filtered down through the break in the trees overhead.  Out of her heavy plate, she was tall and gracefully shaped despite the powerful musculature of a fighting woman.  Her hair and skin were pale in the half light, contrasting sharply against the dark crosshatch of the evergreens behind her as if he were looking at a living etching.

Cullen’s breath caught as his heart yearned towards the simple beauty of her there in the clearing.  There had only ever been one other woman who had captured his thoughts in this way.  After the first time, in his turmoil and anger, he had sworn that he would never allow himself to make that mistake again - he would never allow anyone that foothold in his mind so that it could never be twisted and turned against him again.  And yet, here he was.  Here she was.  He stood, frozen to the spot, and watched what she would do next.

Magna moved slowly over to the rock wall as if stiff from her meditations.  Her body obscured the work of her hands, but Cullen saw her shoulders jerk, once, twice, as if fixing something into place and testing her strength against it.  In the next moment, she was backing away into the center of the clearing, her fingers loosing the clasps of her surcoat as she exhaled deeply into the frigid air.

He shouldn’t be watching this.  Cullen knew that he should look away, but he was mesmerized and confused by what he was seeing.  Magna’s back straightened.  Her face tilted up towards the sky for a long instant.  There was a wet glimmer on her cheek - evidence of tears.  It was not until Cullen glanced beyond her to see the blade of her sword standing sharply out from the rock wall, the hilt jammed solidly into a crevice of the stone and point leveled at her chest, that he understood with sudden jolt of horror what was about to happen.

“No!”

His feet pounded across the thin blanket of snow just as Magna moved to begin her fatal sprint.  His chest collided with her shoulder, his arms wrapping tightly around her and dragging her down hard before she could impale herself on the blade.  The breath went out of her with a painful whoop as her chest impacted the ground, but she was a fighter - she recovered herself in an instant, twisting and kicking like a wild animal.

“Magna!” Cullen called to her as they tumbled over each other, as if her name was a spell that would bring her back to her senses.  

She was strong, she had the force of fear behind her, but he was heavier than she was and he had more to fight for.  Finally, he managed to pin her, trapping her arms at her sides as he clamped himself around her for dear life, and she emitted a strangled cry of frustration and went still.  Cullen could feel her heart thundering under her breast, her lungs struggling to fill themselves with air.  Her body strained against his arms like a bow waiting for the arrow to be released.

“Don’t do this,” he told her swiftly, securing his grip while he had the chance.  “Maker’s breath - you’re worth more than this.”

“Let me go.”  The groan ground out of her with searing anguish.  “Aren’t you finished with me?  Haven’t I done enough?”

She tried once more to break free, but the fight was bleeding out of her.  Cullen held firm and at last he felt her slump against him in defeat, weeping.  He held her as her breath came in ragged, aching sobs.

“Talk to me,” he insisted, when she had shuddered to stillness.  The cold was nothing.  The churned up slush that soaked into their clothes was nothing.  Not compared to what was at stake.  

He listened as the dam was breached and the words flooded out of her, wave after wave of torment and pain breaking against him.  The loneliness of growing up in the Chantry school, barely able even to remember the family that had sent her there.  Her determination to live up to the high expectations of the men who had trained her - even higher because she was the only woman in her cohort.  The litany of small daily abuses she had witnessed in the Circle.  The agony of what had happened to her in the marshes of Orlais with the deaths of the yielded apostates, her captain murdered by a fellow templar and gagging on bloody death in her arms while she was powerless to save him.  The terrified wandering that followed as she contemplated the inquest that would be waiting when she returned to Ostwick alone while the lyrium slowly stole her mind from her.  

He listened to her describe the night that, sitting among the Red Templars who had saved her life, her faith in the Maker and in the Chantry had finally died. She had replaced it with a different purpose.  A purpose that would ensure that no templar and no mage would ever have to suffer what she had seen and experienced again.  He listened to the despair in her voice as she recounted her failure at the Conclave and her determination to be worthy of her commander’s trust anyway, to keep his secrets and die a true templar at the end.

“And for what?” she asked him, her voice tortured beyond endurance.  “For that future I saw in Redcliffe?  All of those people at the Conclave - my brothers who drank the red and became monsters - all of the blood on my hands - the torture, the pain.  That’s the world I fought for?  That was what it all leads up to?”

“You’re here now,” Cullen tried to assure her, firm against the weight of her sorrow.  They were sitting, flecked with bits of ice and fallen pine needles. His hands were on her quaking shoulders like a yoke, her head bowed between his arms.  The curtain of her hair hid her face from him, but he could see the tears falling, rolling down through her fingers into the snow.  “We won’t let it end that way.”

“Everything I’ve ever believed in has been a lie.  The Breach is closed; you don’t need me anymore.  I deserve to die for what I’ve done,” she protested.  She shook her head, grimacing as she forced out the words.  “Just let me end it, Cullen.  I can’t live with this.  Please.”

She had never used his name before.  It broke his heart.  Cullen moved his hands to her cheeks.  She flinched - the flesh beneath the new scar was still tender, or else she simply cringed away from the idea that anyone would ever want to touch her again.  He made her look at him.  Her eyes were wide and red-rimmed with pain.  Dirty tear tracks streaked her face.  She looked as hopeless and haunted as he had ever seen another living being look in his life.

“You can,” he told her, determined, willing her to absorb the words.  “You will.”

Her expression crumpled for an instant - but she nodded,accepting the pronouncement like a sentence.

“I betrayed you.  You trusted me, and I sent you to Redcliffe instead of Therinfal so I could give myself up to Alexius and the Elder One.  I’m sorry.”

“I know.  But you stood with us when it counted.  And the Breach is sealed.  You will get through this.  We’ll fix it together.”

They sat back from each other, Magna wiping tears from her eyes.  Cullen watched as she drew a long breath.  It would take time.  It had taken him years to come to terms with all of his anger and fear and guilt.  But the initial crisis was past.  If anyone could pull themselves out of the darkness, it would be Magna.  And she would have help.  He would make certain of that.  She shook her head forlornly, her thoughts already turning away from herself and back outward.

“Samson will already be at Therinfal.  I’ve seen what the red lyrium can do.  We have to help them.  The templars there -”

“Wait.  Samson?” Cullen interjected, frowning.  The name dredged up a difficult memory of his own from his past in Kirkwall.  A dreadful thought struck him.  He grasped Magna’s shoulder, looking for the truth in her face, hoping that it was not what he feared.  It could not be the same man.  “ _Raleigh_ Samson?”

And that was when the warning bells of Haven began to toll out, ominous and frantic, across the hills.


	6. Martyr Rage

No plan ever survived first contact with the enemy.  Samson had reminded the Elder One of this many times.  He reminded himself of it again as the orderly columns of his Red Templars spread out through the cold valley around him.  

Black clouds flowed across the sky overhead, swirling around the cancerous-looking pit that had been left by the Breach.  A cruel wind was blowing, hissing through the trees and moaning across the mountaintops.  Snow would be falling before midnight, but his templars were no longer bothered by something as paltry as the cold.  He looked left and right, marveling at the spectacle once again - hundreds of armored knights, their bodies riddled with blood-red spikes of lyrium, marching under his command.  The hammer of the new age.  The red storm breaking on the world at last.

In the distance, chantry bells began to ring.  They had finally been spotted.  Far too late for the poor sods at Haven to do anything about it, Samson knew.  His vanguard had done deadly efficient work in the passes, wiping out the Inquisition’s few forward scouts before the message of their approach could be passed along.  He’d timed the attack perfectly, just when the Inquisition had its guard down - just when they felt safe.  He had no doubt they’d put up a fight - that type were always bloody heroes right down to the end - but they were massively outnumbered and outclassed.  If not by his templars, then certainly by the Elder One’s dragon.  They’d die like dogs there behind their rickety palisade walls.  All, except one.

“Your protege has betrayed you,” Corypheus had told him there in the chapel of Therinfal Redoubt.  The massive hall at the Seeker fortress had been shrouded in gloom, lit with the sickly light of candles and filled by the suffocating sweet smoke of censers.  The icon of Andraste had been torn down and discarded.  The Elder One had taken her place, seated in terrible majesty at the transept before the altar.  

Samson had read the reports.  In the beginning, he had given Magna up for dead - obliterated in the scouring fire of the explosion.  Corypheus was a near god, but she had been only flesh and blood.  It had been a hard blow to accept.  He had ordered her to her death after all, just as he had feared he would in the end - his best and most dedicated officer - the only woman he had ever loved.  But rage followed quickly on the heels of grief.  It was the Chantry’s fault, just like everything else.  They had found a way to bollocks up the ritual and killed Magna in the process.  He would paint the walls of the Grand Cathedral with blood for that before this was over.  They would pay, just as he would make them pay for what they had done to him and to all templars and mages everywhere.

But, then, the reports had grown stranger.  The Breach.  A second Inquisition.  A woman fallen from the Fade with a holy mark on her hand that could sear the sky closed once more - the Herald of Andraste, they said.  Rubbish, Samson had thought, until the name had reached him.   _Magna Trevelyan_.

“Trevelyan’s too loyal for that,” Samson had told the Elder One, standing before him in the chapel.  There was no doubt in his mind.  “She’d die before she turned traitor.  And half of Thedas would be on our doorstep right now if she had, with what she knows.  No, she’s red right down to the bone.  I’d stake my life on it.”

The ancient magister’s face was impassive, emotionless.  He had the eyes of a dragon - dangerous, powerful, disinterested, divorced from the concerns of a mere mortal.  Fixated on glory.  They had pierced into Samson there before his throne as if they could read his very thoughts before he became aware of them himself.

“If she’s with this Inquisition, it’s as a prisoner.  They’re desperate.  They need a figurehead, a puppet savior to prop up.  They don’t know what the Anchor is, much less where it came from.  That much is certain from the reports.  They’re using her - and if I know Trevelyan, she’s fighting them tooth and nail every inch of the way,” he had continued, firming up his case.

“Her blunder has cost me years worth of preparation,” Corypheus had replied.  “My patience wears thin with these repeated failures.  Alexius has fallen.  He failed even to secure the mages for my armies.  Prepare your men to march.  I will go to Haven and I will reclaim the Anchor from Trevelyan myself.”

A chill of fear had suffused Samson’s spine.  Since learning that Magna was alive, he had been determined to get her back somehow.  If she was a prisoner, she had held out this long for the possibility of escape or rescue.  He owed it to her.  He wanted her at his side again.  He had saved her once before when she had been nothing more to him than a promising convert, a young templar in over her head and dying in a bog.  Now, when she was so much more to him, he would move heaven and earth to save her again, given the chance.  If the Elder One allowed him that chance.

“Corypheus,” Samson had called, stepping forward.  The magister watched him, unblinking and unmoving.  His request had been risky - but what use was a bloody god if he couldn’t grant a prayer now and again?  “When you’ve taken back the Anchor, will there be anything left of her?”

“You wish me to spare her life.”

“She’s useful to me.”  It wasn’t the real reason, but it wasn’t a lie either.  Samson remembered gazing up into the awful, twisted face before him, fearful, waiting, his heart pounding to hear the verdict that he desperately hoped for.

“If she is as you claim - if she will kneel and surrender the Anchor - if the Anchor can be extracted - you may do as you wish with her afterwards.”

It was not the answer that Samson had wanted.  But it was as good as he was going to get.  And so he had planned.  He had prepared.  He had watched his templars grow - grotesquely sprouting into the most fearsome army that Thedas had ever known.  He had looked them in the eye each and every day with fierce pride.  Whatever happened to them now, they would die at their zenith.  In the few hours that he slept, for he seemed to need it less and less as time went by, he had dreamed of Magna - her voice, her face there on the moonlit mountainside, her touch on his body.  And he had waited for the day - this day - when he would see her again.

“Light the torches,” Samson told the runners.  “Let’s let these poor bastards see what they’re up against.”

The order went out among the troops and, wave by wave, the slopes and valley of Haven lit up around him like a starry night sky - each pinpoint of light a Red Templar, each a perfect engine of destruction.  He crested a jagged outcropping of rock, the place that would give him the best vantage point to direct the battle.  The Inquisition had done a tolerable amount of work to shore up their defenses, but it would be fruitless in the end.  Their walls would not stand against even the first wave of his onslaught.  Their siegeworks would burn.  Their stone chantry might hold a little longer, but not against dragon-fire.  It would be a slaughter.

“You know your business,” he had told his officers earlier in the day, marching up and down their ranks, looking into their red-veined, slowly-calcifying faces.  “Kill anything that moves inside of those walls, except their Herald.  She’s one of us.  Some of you know her already.  Those that don’t, you’ll know her when you see her.  Bring her to me.  The red storm is here, my beautiful bastards.  Take it to them.”

Samson looked down from his perch, scouring the ranks of Inquisition soldiers as they scurried to secure the civilians inside the walls and man the defensive barricades.  He could practically smell their fear, sense in the way they moved.  A familiar face - even from this distance - turned up towards him in the torchlight before their gates.

“Rutherford,” he chuckled without humor as he recognized the features of the Inquisition’s ex-templar general.  “I guess an unlucky copper always does turn back up.”

He’d heard that Cullen had taken up with the Inquisition.  The man had come to Kirkwall as a twitchy young knight from some misbegotten Ferelden Circle when Samson was already well-established there.  Supposedly, he’d been shuffled off to collect himself after things went pear-shaped during the Blight, but why anyone had thought the Gallows would be an easier post for him was a mystery.  

Samson had been an experienced templar, a little older, more laid back then.  They’d assigned Rutherford to his barracks to give the younger man a chance to calm down.  He could still remember waking in the darkness to the sound of Rutherford’s night-terrors at first.  Still, he’d been a good templar, decent to the mages, dutiful.  Later, after Samson had been drummed out of the Order, Meredith had made him her Knight-Captain.  Poor blighter.

It was the woman standing next to Rutherford, though, that made his chest seize and his thoughts burn when his eyes found her.  Blonde hair, templar armor, a face that Samson would have recognized out of a crowd of thousands.  Magna.

 _What have they done to you?_ he thought, watching her turn to speak to Rutherford in earnest tones, the hairs rising on the back of his neck as he felt his teeth clenching hard against the ringing throb building in his ears - his own agitated blood.

“If she will not surrender herself,” the Elder One’s sonorous voice rumbled as the magister crested the hill beside him, reminding him, “then she must die.”

“She knows where she belongs,” Samson replied, curtly, assuring himself as much as his master.  He turned towards his aids.  “Sound the avaunt.  Let’s have it done.”

 

~~0~~

 

Haven was lost.  But the battle was not.  Not yet.

Magna stood before the doors of the chantry, her eyes closed, allowing her breathing to deepen as she drew up the walls of her interior fortress around herself once again and for what would likely be the last time.

Outside of the chantry walls, there was only destruction.  Haven burned.  She had saved all of those that she could, buying them time to seek refuge inside the ancient stone walls of the chapel.  Behind her, the Inquisition leadership had begun to evacuate the civilians, mages,and soldiers along the hidden path revealed to them by a repentant Chancellor Roderick.  They would get out.  Magna knew that Cullen would see them safely away.  Her heart hurt at the prospect that she would never have an opportunity to thank him for his kindness to her - that she would likely never see him again.  In a different life maybe - but speculation would do her no good.  She would thank him instead by buying him the time he needed to save his people.

“If the Inquisition is meant for this - if _you_ are meant for this - then I _pray_ for you,” the mortally wounded Chancellor had told her earnestly, his face a mass of bloody bruises, before they had taken him away.  He had clamored for her execution from the very beginning, even more strongly than the others.  She accepted his benediction now as a sign, confirmation that this was the path she was destined for.  Perhaps all along.

“Are you ready?” a voice said.  Magna turned to see Cassandra standing behind her.  The Seeker’s face was as laconic as ever, but her dark eyes were expressive.  They looked back at Magna with a wash of different emotions.  Pity.  Respect.  Regret.  Blackwall and Dorian waited beyond.

The moment had come.  Magna turned and stepped towards the Seeker.  She looked the woman full in the face and offered her hand.  Here at the end, there could be no grudges.  She would go to whatever waited for her beyond the doors unburdened.  Cassandra accepted the gesture with grace, returning her grip warmly.

“I was wrong about you,” the Nevarran told her, sincerely.  “For what was done to you, forgive me.”

“You had cause.  After everything, I’m not sorry to find us on the same side,” Magna assured her.  They smiled at each other, if weakly.

She approached Blackwall next.  In his Warden armor, he looked like a figure from one of the old stories - a warrior ready to ride a griffon into the battle.  Magna had shut him out these last few days.  She had not wanted to face him after Redcliffe - not after the vision of him she had seen there, slowly dying of the red lyrium corruption, holding the door so that she could have a chance to go back and wipe it all away.  But his smile was genuine when she looked up into his face, and he clasped her forearm as heartily as he ever had after one of their sparring matches.  She pulled him into a brief embraced.  If not for him - if not for his steadfastness, for his refusal to accept anything less from her than what she knew was right - she would have crumbled there before Alexius.  She would never forget that.

“It’s been an honor, Warden,” she told him, letting him hear her gratitude in her words and see it in her face.

Dorian smirked as she turned to him.

“I detest long, tearful goodbyes,” he told her, characteristically flippant.  Though he was a mage and every instinct inside of her told her to remain aloof from him, they had been through much together in that terrible future.  When Magna’s world was falling to pieces around her, he had been there - irreverent and buoyant and cussed - to keep her moving forward.  She shook his hand with good will.  “It does make a pretty picture, though, yes?  A dashing Tevinter mage - a beautiful southern templar - boldly walking out together towards a tragic battle, complete with dragon. Varric will write a book about us.  It will scandalize my family.  I couldn’t have arranged it better myself.”

Magna looked at each of them in turn one last time - some of the bravest people she had ever met.  Enemies who, here at the end, had become friends.

“It’s time,” she told them.

The first avalanche had blocked the main force of the Red Templars from pushing through the pass, but there would be plenty still to fight through.  Magna stepped out into the portico of the chantry, feeling the wind bite into her skin under her helm.  Large snowflake drifted slowly around her like fat, white insects as she quickly surveyed what stood between them and the final remaining trebuchet.  A terrible illumination filled the village as the buildings burned, monstrous figures moving amongst the smoke.

_For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water._

Magna led the charge.  The world around her was noise and clashing bodies, blood and metal and the smell of charring wood and death.  She felt nothing, neither pain nor regret.  She was beyond that now.  Neither did she try to recognize the faces behind the helms.  The people she had fought beside and laughed with next to campfires, who she had cared for and supported and regarded as her true family, had died already - poisoned by the red lyrium and the Elder One.  Her sword rent through them, cutting them down.  It was the final mercy that she could bestow upon her brothers.  The trebuchet drew nearer.

_As a the moth sees light and goes towards flame, so she should see fire and go towards Light._

Spotting Samson there on the hill overlooking the village had made her falter at first.  He was her commander, her mentor, her friend.  He had saved her - he had picked her up out of the mud with his own hands and given her back her life.  He could not know the truth, just as she had not until she had seen the Elder One’s future with her own eyes.  As much as he loved his men, his fellow templars, he could not have known what the red would do to them or to himself.  

The thought of Samson laying out there somewhere in the valley, buried beneath hundreds of pounds of ice and debris, grieved her and broke her heart.  He had wanted a better world for templars and mages alike.  In his name, Magna would give the Inquisition a chance to make it so.

 _The Veil holds no uncertainty for her and she will know no fear of death_.

Wave after wave of enemies assaulted them as Magna hauled at the stiff levers and cranks of the siege weapon, turning the enormous trebuchet to aim it towards the largest of the mountains with the thickest ice pack.  Her comrades kept the worst of the assault off of her as she worked.  If her aim was good, it would bury the enemy.  It would bury Haven, too, but the others would be well away by then.  She would hold the attention of the dragon until the last possible moment.

The mechanism finally shuddered into place just as a thunderclap of dragon wings roared overhead, close enough for the draft to make her lose her footing.  Magna looked up into the mouth of hell - the great black beast bearing down on her with jaws wide.

“Move!” she cried out to the others, scrambling upright, but the blast of dragon-fire exploded into the ground around her and lifted her bodily, sending her spinning into the air as if she were little more than a child’s wooden toy.  The ground met her hard, knocking the wind from her lungs and sending blossoms of throbbing color across her vision.  Pain exploded through her body.

For a terrifying few seconds, her limbs refused to respond.  But Magna groaned, gritting her teeth as she rolled onto her hands and knees and calculated the damage.  At least two ribs broken.  The sharp individual agonies of torn muscles and deep bruises throughout her body.  A dull insistent throb in her shield arm that worried her.  Every breath was painful, but she could still fight.  She could still trigger the trebuchet if she could reach it.

As she struggled to stand, a figure emerged from the swirling snow and the drifting smoke of the burning hamlet - unnaturally tall, emaciated, unmistakeable.  A nightmare wrapped in tattered flesh and red lyrium.  The Elder One.  Magna felt the blood drain from her face.  The earth shook as his dragon landed behind her, cutting off all escape.  At least, she reflected as she quickly glanced around her, the others had gotten away.  She was alone.

“Your stumbling has kept me waiting long enough,” the magister told her, his voice seeming to reverberate through the acrid air.  His eyes glared down at her as red as living coals, but there was no anger behind them.  There was nothing behind them but unending pride - an eternity of malice and outraged arrogance.  He raised a long, skeletal hand at her imperiously.  “You will kneel before your god.”

_For the Maker shall be her beacon and her shield, her foundation and her sword._

Her faith in the Chantry had been dashed.  Her faith in the Elder One had been a lie.  But, there in the meditation garden beside the chantry, Magna had prayed - to anyone, to whoever was listening.  She had prayed for the strength to drive the blade in, for forgiveness for her failures, for mercy to ease the suffering of those she had harmed.  She had prayed that nothing she had seen in that awful future would come to pass.  She had shriven herself as best she could there before the shrine of Andraste.  And then, almost miraculously, Cullen had appeared to stay her hand.  An answer, as much as any prayer ever received an answer.  And so, despite herself - here at the very last - she would would put aside her doubts.  She would believe.  And she would let that seed of faith, so small that she had not even known she still possessed it, carry her to the last victory.

Righteous wrath suffused her.  Her body felt energized, like the rush of the lyrium multiplied a hundredfold.  She faced the ancient horror before her.  She felt the dragon’s fetid, scorching breath at her back.  She gripped her shield - the flaming sword of the Maker’s Bride going forward before her - and she roared into the face of doom.

“You are no god! And you never will be!”

 

~~0~~

 

The storm had almost abated at last.  Cullen stepped through the flap of his tent and stood in the drifting snow, surveying once again the hastily erected camp around him.  Aside from the glow of a handful of torches and the few campfires that they had been able to keep going in the damp and wind, darkness had fallen.  It had been evening when he had finally dragged himself to his tent and let exhaustion overtake him after more than a day on his feet.  By his reckoning, he had managed to sleep for an hour or two, but the nightmares had woken him in the end as they usually did.  This time there was a new face among the cruel apparitions.  Another woman that he had begun to care for and ultimately lost.

Despite the overwhelming odds, he had been so certain that Magna would find a way out.  Everything she did - sealing the rifts, defeating Alexius at Redcliffe - seemed to be guided by some unseen hand.  Not an hour before the battle, he had held her in his arms, protecting her from the weight of her own despair while he convinced her to continue living.  It had seemed impossible that it was all for nothing - that he could have pulled her back from the abyss only to send her out to another death.  When the others had returned - the Seeker, the Warden, and the mage - his heart had leapt.  And then he had looked into their grieving eyes, noticed that their party was one short, and the truth had slammed into him like an enemy’s warhammer.  Magna was gone.

The snow crunched underfoot as he walked between the row of tents, assuring himself that his people were still alright, that their position was holding.  The storm had broken on them with a unrelenting fury as they had descended into a long narrow valley, the blizzard howling through the mountains and forcing them to call a halt and seek shelter.  There had scarcely been enough tents and supplies for the morass of soldiers and civilians, but the stewards had made it work. The Inquisition’s people were nothing if not resourceful.

Cullen could still remember the awful sound of the second avalanche.  He had stood next to the archer as the flaming arrow went up, a sign to Magna and her companions that the evacuation was complete.  He had watched as a single trebuchet missile was released high over the largest of the peaks and slammed into its thick ice pack.  The roar, as deadly sheets of icy debris had detached from the southern slope of the mountain and crashed down into the valley of Haven, had been deafening.  Nothing could have survived it.  His heart had thrilled for an instant - victory! - and then dropped into the pit of his stomach as it dawned upon him that it was not only the enemy that had been buried alive.

“We need to push onward as soon as the storm lets up,” the Seeker had said, as the Inquisition’s leadership huddled together in the command tent, trying to find a way forward from the disaster.  “I saw the dragon fly away before the avalanche.  This Elder One is still out there.”

“And the bulk of Samson’s army was trapped on the other side of the pass.  They’ll be waiting out the storm just as we are,” Cullen had agreed.  Everything inside of him ached, but there would be time for grief when the survivors were safe again.  “We have to move carefully.  The civilians won’t have the stamina for a forced march.  I’m not even certain where we would go.”

Although they were on the Ferelden side of the Frostbacks, the mages had been exiled from the kingdom.  They would find no shelter there.  Orlais was the only other possibility, but that was a difficult trek through the mountains and the bloody battlefields of the Orlesian civil war waited on the other side.  An undeclared army marching into the Empire from Ferelden would provoke an incident and they could not afford to become embroiled in the existing conflict.  That was only the most immediate of their problems, however.

“Without the Herald, it will be difficult to find further backers to aid us in rebuilding,” Josephine had admitted, voicing what they were all - in one way or another - thinking.

The mention of the dead woman cast a further pall over the group.  They had not fully realized, until she was gone, how indispensable Trevelyan had become to the Inquisition’s efforts.  The people loved her.  She was their Herald, their savior.  The woman who would make it right.  The soldiers practically idolized her.  Seeing her come and go and fight and train had inspired them all to do the same.  Even those among the inner circle who knew her crimes - even those who had reason to hate her for them - had seen her courage and her skill for what they were: absolutely essential to the mission.  With her gone, the days ahead of the Inquisition would be dark and perilous ones indeed.

“It may be time to consider terms with the Chantry,” Leliana had stated, her expression tired and vexed.  The spymaster had been quiet since making camp.  She blamed herself, Cullen knew.  Her agents should have been able to send warning of an army the size of Samson’s well in advance, giving them time to prepare.  Something had gone wrong.

It was more than that, though.  Leliana had been the most cynical about the Herald right up until the end.  She was the one who had tortured Magna.  She was the one who had most desired vengeance, though she preferred to hold off until after the templar had exhausted her usefulness.  And, in the end, Magna had sacrificed herself to buy the Inquisition time - time that they would have had anyway if Leliana’s agents had managed to get word ahead.  Leliana’s lover, the Grey Warden Aeducan, had died to end Blight ten years before in much the same manner.  There was pain behind the spymaster’s eyes.  Time would tell how deep the damage went.

Cullen’s breath steamed in the air before him as he sighed, nodding to the soldiers who still remained on duty as he passed them.  The discussion had been tabled there, before an argument could erupt.  The Seeker was vehemently opposed to seeking Chantry support or making any deals that would compromise the autonomy of the Inquisition and this put her at odds with Josephine and Leliana.  Tensions were running high under the surface, fueled by weariness and grief.  They had separated to try and rest, to come back to the discussion after some food and sleep.  A decision would have to be made - but their options were now extremely limited.

Sentries had been posted at the edges of the camp and Cullen turned his footsteps in that direction.  Whatever dissention went on in the upper echelons, his men needed encouragement.  They were loyal, they would endure, but they needed to see their commander pulling his weight beside them and looking out for their interests.  As he approached the rear flank, he spotted the soldiers on guard duty standing at their small fire, as well as a woman sitting on an outcrop of rock near them, facing back towards the direction of Haven.  The Seeker.

Cassandra had taken Magna’s death the hardest.  They had become separated in the battle.  The Seeker felt responsible for leaving the templar behind.  She looked up as Cullen approached her, her face tired and sad.  A reflection of his own expression, too, he was certain.  He exchanged a few words with the sentries, and then took a seat next to his colleague on the rocks.

For a few moments, there was silence as they stared back up the slope of the valley.  And then Cassandra spoke.

“I keep expecting to see her appear over the rise.”  The Seeker’s eyes remained focused on the landscape.  “She was always so determined. If anyone could have survived . . .I am sorry, Cullen.  I know that you cared for her.”

He had.  He hadn’t known that it had been so obvious to the Seeker, but his concern for Magna over the last month had grown beyond either camaraderie or friendship.  It was likely that nothing would ever have come of it - he was cursed to only fall for unavailable women evidently - but there had been a part of him that had hoped.  It would do no good to dwell on it now.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

The Seeker ran a hand down the back of her neck, closing her eyes.

“She forgave me, for what we did to her. In the beginning, I thought that she was a monster.  But in the end, she was a better woman than me all along.”

They sat vigil together there for a while, silently listening to the wind moan across the mountains and through the trees as the snow continued to fall.  Already it had covered all evidence of the path that they had taken from the ruined village.  In a day, it would cover the ruins of Haven as well, Cullen knew.  As if the Inquisition had never existed there at all.

One of the sentries stood, suddenly, walking out from the fire a short distance.  Cullen watched as the man scanned around him.  Wolves had been spotted in the area.  Their cries could be heard at a distance further out into the forest.  The beasts never ventured too close to a fire, but the sentries chased them away with sling stones whenever one dared to come within eyesight of the camp, just in case.  It wasn’t a wolf that had caught the man’s attention, though.  He called the other two over and pointed at something further up the hill.

Cullen rose, feeling Cassandra do the same beside him, dread filling his stomach like a ball of ice.  If the enemy was upon them, they were finished.  They had nowhere to hide now.

“What is it?” he asked, moving to stand beside the soldiers.  One pointed up the slope at an enormous, jagged outcropping of broken stone.

“I saw something up there, ser.  Right by those rocks.”

He peered, squinting through the flurry that surrounded them.  Nothing.  A false alarm, a mirage brought on by stress and the shifting snow.  Then, movement.  A figure appeared from around the bend of the rocks, using the stones to prop itself up as it struggled along.  The wind whipped a snatch of ragged purple fabric out against the white background - a templar’s skirting.

“It’s her!  It’s the Herald!” one of the men yelped.  

Without waiting for orders, the soldiers pelted up the hill, snow flying in their wake as Cullen came hard on their heels.  His heart pounded.  He couldn’t let himself believe it.  Not yet.  It was a straggler, one of the missing ex-templars that had been lost in the battle and had finally found their way along the survivors’ trail.  It would be worse if he believed it was her only to have his hopes dashed again.

The templar stumbled a few paces towards them and collapsed to her knees, but the sentries were there to lift her up.  They removed her helm, giving her room to breath.  Tangled, honey-colored hair lashed out into the breeze.  The face that turned up to Cullen as he reached her, his arms going out to steady her along with those of the soldiers, was nearly blue with the cold and rimed with frost.  But the eyes - gold-flecked green - opened, focusing with difficulty on Cullen’s own, and there could be no doubt left in his mind. It was Magna.  The Herald.  Alive.

“Maker be praised,” Cassandra breathed, her voice choking with relief.  But there was no time to lose.

“Get a stretcher.  A blanket.  Anything.  Move!” Cullen rapped out quickly to the sentries, and two of them rushed away.

The templar tried to stand, but she had pushed her body so far beyond her final reserves of endurance already that the effort seemed to drain her completely at last.  Her eyes closed again, her head slumped forward.  Cullen wrapped his arms around her, feeling her body solid and real and cold as ice.  She would not die now.  Not when she had come this far.

He looked to Cassandra, who nodded, and together they slung Magna’s arms around their necks and lifted her to begin the slow descent back down the slope to the camp.  A miracle had been delivered to their doorstep - they would not test the Maker’s patience any further.  Magna had carried the full burden of the Inquisition into that last catastrophic battle.  The Inquisition would carry her the rest of the way home.

 

~~0~~

 

After what had seemed like an eternity in darkness, Samson opened his eyes to see sunlight filtering through the opening of the rocky crevice he had wedged himself into two days before.  His limbs ached.  His entire body throbbed.  Hunger, for more than just food, growled through him and gnawed at his bones like an enraged beast.  But he was alive.

Carefully, he extracted himself, grunting as he levered the weight of his body and armor out of the rough shelter and into cold daylight.  A very different world from the one he had last seen awaited him.

Haven was gone.  Not a single building remained, as if it had never existed.  The landscape was strewn with the wreckage of trees, rocks, and - here and there - bodies half buried in the snow.  Not far away, a templar gauntlet stuck up from the broken surface of hard-packed snow, grasping at air that the owner would never breath again.

The first avalanche had been a surprise.  A last ditch effort of the defenders to cut off the main force on the other side of the pass, Samson had thought.  Clever, but it would only slow the inevitable.  The fools were beaten already and they didn’t even realize it.  His vanguard would have been more than enough to finish them.  It was only when the second trebuchet missile arced higher overhead that Samson felt fear for the first time during the battle.  A possibility that he had not thought of before had occurred to him - and by the time he realized how spitefully the Inquisition was prepared to die, it was far too late to retreat through the pass.

Shouts in the distance confirmed the presence of search parties.  Samson climbed the stones to higher ground and looked out over the ruined valley.  A band of Red Templars tramped through the wreckage, stopping to assess the dead a they went.  With the storm broken, his army had managed to dig their way through the pass at last. The vanguard had been destroyed, but it had only been a fifth of his fighting force.  They would regroup.  And, with the Inquisition at an end, their attention could be directed back to their main purpose.  A victory, if a costly one.

As he surveyed the destruction, Samson became aware of another, deep ache inside of himself that surpassed the minor injuries of the flesh.  A knot of remembered fury twisting in on itself once again.  Magna.  

He had lost track of her in the battle, but his eyes had not deceived him.  She had been there, fighting alongside the Inquisition.  He was almost certain that the first avalanche, at least, had been her doing.

 _Your protege has betrayed you_ , the Elder One’s pronouncement repeated in his mind.  

He would never have believed it if he had not seen it with his own eyes, but - no.  She wasn’t to blame.  She had been a prisoner for more than a month - who knew what the bastards had done to twist her during that time?  A month was more than long enough for the lyrium-hunger to become unbearable, for madness to set in.  She was too good.  Too dedicated.  He loved her too much to believe it.  It was easier for him to imagine Magna breaking under torture than it was to believe her capable of turning against him of her own will.  They had done this to her.  Rutherford.  The Chantry.  The Inquisition.  Them, not her.

And it was over now, besides.  The valley had become Magna’s tomb and half a mountain had filled the grave.  She would have appreciated the idea of resting beside the bodies of her fallen brothers in the end.  Samson scowled fiercely, feeling his fists tighten until his knuckles ached.  He had come too late to save her, but he would remember her as she had been before he had sent her away.  Perfect.  Beautiful.  His.  She would always be his.  And, for however long the red lyrium let him live, he would be hers.  No one else would ever touch again where her fingerprints still burned on his heart.

As he hailed the search party, as he set out to join them, Samson forced his rage down, packing it tighter and deeper within until it petrified, leaving room for nothing else.  Before this was over, he would avenge Magna and all the others a thousandfold and more.  Anyone who stood in his path would burn.  He swore it.


	7. Know My Heart

Skyhold was a wonder.  The fortress had been long abandoned - the grounds were overgrown, there were ravens nesting in the towers, and crumbling stonework aplenty to be repaired - but it was solid and defensible and enormous.  Even after a month of residence, Magna was still stumbling upon new chambers, corridors, and tower rooms.  More than once, she had gotten lost in her own castle.

 _Her_ castle.  The words still didn’t sound right together.  

Much had happened since the destruction of Haven.  She had gone from heretical prisoner to leader of the Inquisition in barely a fortnight and there had been scarcely a moment’s time since then to pause and make sense of it all.  Inquisitor.  Your Worship.  Magna could not help but flinch a little inside whenever she heard the titles murmured by the servants or proclaimed by one of Josephine’s noble visitors.  “Ser” was the only title that she had ever wanted, and to have it supplanted by this new moniker felt like losing a part of herself that she had fought very hard to hold on to.

Magna had almost refused when the Seeker and the spymaster had offered her the position there in the courtyard of the castle.  After what she had done?  Were they mad?  But, looking into the faces of the Inquisition leadership, looking out at the soldiers and workers who gazed expectantly back up at her, Magna had been forced to concede the Seeker’s point.  Corypheus needed to be stopped.  For good or ill, by mistake or providence, Magna was the one to whom all eyes turned.  Reluctantly, she had accepted the mantle of Inquisitor - and the myriad of worries and concerns that came with it.

The battlements had become a favorite haunt of late when she could escape her many obligations for a little while.  It was quiet on the wall tops.  Few of the nobles and sycophants who came to gawk and simper at the Inquisitor ventured that far away from the hall and the soldiers had their own duties to concern themselves with.  Plus, the view was tremendous, especially on a clear day.  Magna leaned on the crenelations and gazed out over the vista of the Frostbacks - blue sky meeting white-capped peaks as far as the eye could see.  The air was thinner at this altitude, but clear and cold and invigorating.  It helped her clear her head when the reports, the letters, the meetings, and the never-ending work of directing a war effort threatened to overwhelm her.

More had changed in her life than just the title in front of her name.  From childhood, Magna had always known who she was without question.  Recruit.  Templar.  Red Templar.  Now, she was something other, something in between - still a templar, but no longer truly a Templar - and she was still trying to divine what that meant.  The seed of faith that she had uncovered in herself as she faced down Corypheus had sprouted and taken root, but what it would grow into Magna could not yet say.  She kept the Chantry and the bad memories that it aroused for her at a distance.  She prayed alone in the small shrine off of the castle garden or in her chamber, believing only that, in some way, she was heard.  And that was enough for the present.

Those were not the only changes, however.  Magna glanced to her left, noting the tower that had become the nerve center of the Inquisition’s ever-growing army.  At this time of day, Cullen would be at his desk, absorbed in his field reports, missives, and maps.  When she imagined him there, his brow wrinkling in thought as his scarred lips pressed slightly unevenly together in concentration, she could not help but smile.  And more than smile, if she was honest.

Something had shifted dramatically between them after Haven.  Magna was familiar with the fluttering of youthful attraction - she had felt that from time to time like anyone else, though she had never acted upon it.  Romantic attachments were usually fraught and fleeting for Circle Templars and she had heeded the advice of her elders.  Better to avoid the inevitable heartache if she could.  For a time, she had struggled through an array of confusing emotions about Samson, though she had kept it decidedly to herself to spare them both that embarrassment.  What she was now feeling for Cullen was very different, if just as strong.  Samson had provoked a restlessness within her that matched his own, like the blood surge before a fight or the rush after felling an enemy.  Animal passions.  When she looked at Cullen, when Magna saw his hazel eyes soften as they settled upon her face, that same part of her grew still and peaceful.  She felt happy simply to be near him.  And, in many ways, she could detect that the feeling was mutual.

It was difficult, though.  Where once he had been the captor and she the captive, now Magna was the Inquisitor and he was her general.  A dalliance would give people cause to talk as well as creating a distraction from more important tasks.  And there was much that was still uncertain about her future.  It would be wrong to involve him in that unnecessarily, especially when Cullen had burdens enough of his own at present.  Still, they were friends.  She could enjoy his company, if nothing more.

Magna crossed the wall top and knocked at the tower door, hearing a terse “come in”.  The room beyond was small and somewhat dim - the only light was that which filtered in through the arrow slits in the daylight hours and from the candles at night - but it was organized with military efficiency and neatness.  Cullen’s large desk dominated the back half of the room, and - just as she had imagined - he was leaning over a series of maps, surrounded by stacks of documents.  He glanced up briefly and then looked up fully into her face as he recognized his visitor.

“Inquisitor,” he greeted her warmly, straightening.  His smile was like the strike of flint on steel, the sparks kindling Magna’s own.

“Please.  Not you, too,” she teased with a mock groan as she closed the door behind her.  “I can’t walk to the privy without being ‘Inquisitor’-ed a dozen times.  Have mercy, I beg you.”

He chuckled at that, and Magna took a moment to observe her general.  The light from the arrow slit behind him shone through the roughed furs of his mantle and the waves of his short blond hair, highlighting the strong, well-boned structure of his face and jaw and the breadth of his shoulders.  He was undeniably handsome.  She had noticed it in the beginning, but had not allowed herself to fully appreciate that fact until recently.  A fact that made it all the harder to speak to him now without losing her train of thought.

“Did you need something particular?” Cullen asked her, bestowing his smile on her once more.  “Or is this a social call?  Not that I’m complaining either way.”

Magna felt her face flush slightly, embarrassed to have been caught staring, and she tore her eyes away as she moved further into the room.

“I was just passing and a little voice told me that I should drop by and make certain that my commander was getting enough fresh air up here and that he hadn’t been buried under a collapsing pile of war reports or sustained a grievous paper cut injury or something equally tragic,” Magna told him, setting up the joke to divert his attention from her lapse.  She grinned.  “I’ll have to speak to Cole about that later.”

His laugh was reward enough.  She could see the tension ease from his body slightly and was glad for that.  Just as she was, Cullen was prone to overworking himself.  He was dutiful and diligent to a fault, but it was good to see him relax once in awhile.  And it was good to be the one to bring him a much-needed moment of relief.

“I suppose I have been shut up in here too much of late,” he admitted, circling around his desk to remove the barrier from between them.  When Cullen spoke to his soldiers, he was all command and authority.  But when he spoke to her, there was a gentler quality in his tone that pulled at something inside of Magna, softening her, too.  “And you did suggest spending more time together, didn’t you?  I could do with a quick walk to stretch my legs, if you’re so inclined.”

They exited along the northern battlements and strolled slowly, although Magna found herself suddenly self-conscious.  She had simply wanted to see him for a few moments, to hear his voice, but now she found herself reaching for something to say.

“Did you write back to your sister?” she asked, searching for a strand of memory to begin the conversation.  “I remember you telling me that she had finally tracked you down.”

“I did,” he replied, casting an amused smile at her.  “I seem to recall that it was practically an Inquisitorial order.  I’m sure she’s pleased to have an ally in her campaign.”

It was Magna’s turn to laugh this time.  During a game of chess, Cullen had mentioned his siblings and his sister’s dogged determination to not let him fade out of their family life.  That had intrigued her.  Though she had five siblings of her own, she had last seen them when she was five years old and had never had so much as a letter from them since.  They only existed for her as abstract ideas of people, faint snatches of memory.  The boys of her Templar cohort had become like her brothers instead, but it was not the same thing.  It seemed odd to her that something she had felt the deprivation of so keenly as a child could be so commonplace and forgettable to another.  Magna had made Cullen promise to write back more often if she won the chess match, and it pleased her that he had listened to her advice and followed through.

“Well, I do feel accomplished,” she told him, jocularly.  “Defeating Corypheus will be easy after that.”

They chatted amiably about his home village and his family until they reached the corner tower.  Before they could turned to walk back, Cullen paused.  There was a momentary hesitation, a brief and almost unnoticeable grimace of pain as he lay a hand against one of the raised merlons of the battlements.  Magna knew without asking what the problem was.

Shortly after she had become Inquisitor, Cullen had confessed to her out of a sense of duty that he had stopped taking lyrium when he had joined the Inquisition.  The prospect had immediately alarmed her.  She knew all too well what that felt like and what it could mean.  The idea of him having to endure that torture along with all of the other stress that was heaped upon them all daily had seemed inhuman.  Magna had almost insisted that he cease the attempt - she would have been prepared to make it an order if she had to - but she had also known with equal certainty that it would be wrong to do that.  She understand, as few others in the Inquisition would, what a lifetime of lyrium dependence meant.  Cullen had accepted those chains of his own will - a personal sacrifice.  It was not her place to keep him bound.  To do anything less than honor his choice, however much she feared for his safety, would be disrespectful of his service and his sacrifices - just what she had grown to despise the Chantry for.

“Is it going well?” Magna asked, trying to keep her worry out of her voice, knowing that she did not have to elaborate.  Few templars would ever mention the hunger directly, as if saying the word would summon that dreaded beast.  They shared too much common experience for him to mistake her meaning.

“Better some days than others,” Cullen admitted, collecting himself.  He looked away, embarrassed.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to dampen the conversation.”

“You don’t have to hide it from me,” Magna told him before she could hold back the words.  She moved to be in his line of vision again.  She looked into his eyes, now vexed at his own perceived weakness, and forced a smile.  “I’ve been there.  I know.  You never have to apologize to me for this, Cullen.  You are far braver than I am for even attempting it.”

For a long moment, he simply gazed back at her.  His reply was soft when it came.  “Thank you.”

They started the walk back to his chambers.  The commander was quiet for a few slow strides and then spoke again.

“Were they able to give you any good news as to your own condition?”

After the dust had settled, when the future became something more than a few days or hours away again, Magna had approached Mother Giselle and her healers to determine the extent of the damage that had been done to her body over the course of her year among the Red Templars.  The verdict had not been encouraging.  

Her tolerance for lyrium had been increased dramatically by exposure to the less refined substance.  She would suffer the effects of withdrawal sooner and at higher doses than a normal templar would have.  Her life was likely to be far shorter and the misty dementia that took all templars who lived long enough would come on quicker, though that was all still many years away if she was lucky.  Continuing at a high dose would further decrease her lifespan.  It was possible that she could gradually acclimate to lower and lower doses in order to stem some of the effects, but it would be a difficult process and carried a significant risk of killing her anyway.  There were no good choices, and Magna had not yet decided how to proceed.  Either way, it was a merciful punishment compared to what was now happening to the rest of her Red brethren and so she would accept it without complaint, whatever came of it.

“Only that I’ll likely still have years and years ahead of me to contemplate what I’ve done.  It’s better than I deserve, really.”

Cullen cast her a sidelong glance at that.  She had told her council of advisors everything she knew about Corypheus and the Red Templars once they had reached Skyhold.  Her intelligence on plans and troop movements was too long out of date to be useful and Samson had kept much secret even from her, but she had at least provided an account of what the red lyrium was capable of and its effects.

“You didn’t give them the lyrium.  That was Samson,” the commander told her.  There was a curl of disgust in his voice when he said the name.  

Magna had been surprised to find out that the men had a common history.  They had been friends for a time years ago back in Kirkwall.  Samson had never liked to discuss his time at the infamous Gallows and so Magna had always avoided the subject.  She had gleaned a few details from Maddox - the love letter that had gotten Samson discharged, and his later reinstatement - but hearing Cullen’s account of the events there had made her heart hurt for her former mentor all over again.  The Inquisition’s general was less sympathetic, however, in light of what had happened at Haven and Therinfal.

Magna would never believe that Samson had known what he would be unleashing upon himself and the other Templars.  She would never believe that he had willfully poisoned them or that he had sent her out in service of the Elder One knowing what would come of it.  That was not the man or the commander that she had trusted - even loved, if she was honest with herself - and it bothered her to hear the blame laid at his feet.  It was difficult for her to resist the urge leap to Samson’s defense, but that was a discussion for another time and place.

She paused as they approached Cullen’s tower once more and she looked up at him.  The unpleasant thoughts roused in him by the mention of the Templars and Samson were now forgotten.  There was a tenderness that came into his eyes as he gazed back at her that made Magna warm inside, sending tingling pin pricks up her spine and into her neck.  They were always so busy.  There was always something demanding more of their attention.  And yet ever since they had arrived at Skyhold, there were times when she saw Cullen look at her as if she were the only thing that existed for him in that moment - however brief those moments were.  Now was one of them.  It was confusing and a little frightening and wonderful all at the same time and Magna found herself suddenly lost in that feeling and in those eyes.

“I know that you have an equally difficult path set out before you.  If you need me, for anything, I will be there,” he told her, sincerely.

 _For anything_ . There was more ardor contained in those two words than could fill an anthology of Orlesian love poetry.  Hearing it sped her heart even faster than his gaze.

“And I for you,” Magna assured him, smiling weakly.

The air felt heavy around her as Cullen finally took his leave of her and disappeared behind the tower door once more.  She let out a long, pent up breath and leaned back against the stone parapet, staring up at the empty sky.  Her body felt as keyed up as if she had been running sprint drills in the courtyard with the soldiers instead of simply walking along the wall tops.

So, that was that.  There was no use denying it any longer.  The question now was what to do about it.  Leave well enough alone?  Try for something that her heart would not allow her ignore at the risk of making things awkward between herself and her commander?  And if he wanted the same of her?

“Maker have mercy,” she sighed to herself, closing her eyes, her lips trying to smile with the giddy vertigo of what she was feeling and frown with anxious trepidation all at the same time.

She was going to need help with this one.

 

~~0~~

 

The Skyhold stables were normally a quiet place and Blackwall liked it that way.  Let the nobles have the stuffiness of the hall.  He preferred the earthy scent of fresh straw, the comforting noises of the horses, and the company of people who didn’t look down their noses at such things.  Taking up residence there had also afforded him the opportunity to keep his hands busy between missions and that was no small comfort in itself.

The wooden rocking griffon had started out as a whim of a project, something to pass the time between more important work, but it was coming along nicely.  In desperate times there was always much feting of soldiers and leaders and heroes.  Too many forgot the smallest survivors, those that were most vulnerable and whose innocence could too easily be destroyed by the awfulness of war.  If he could make something to let the children of the refugee camps recapture even a few moments of carefree happiness here and there, Blackwall knew that it would be worth it.

He was leaning back to scrutinize the angle of one of the curved rockers when he heard a step at the entrance to the barn and saw a familiar face appear out of the corner of his eye.  A woman with neatly bound up blonde hair, dressed in fawn-colored tunic and breeches.  Magna.  The Inquisitor.

The title weighed heavily on her, Blackwall knew.  The templar often seemed mortified by the attention it brought to her, even now - but he, like many others, was damned glad that she had accepted leadership of the Inquisition anyway.  After Haven, after seeing her stand and risk her life to save people who had been her captors and enemies not long before, there was no doubt left in his mind that Magna was exactly the person that was needed for the job and her miraculous survival was only more proof that this was how it was meant to be.  She was already making a difference.  

Still, much as he had fallen under the spell of the Inquisitor himself, Blackwall understood that that was not what she needed from him.  They still sparred regularly.  Magna was a gifted leader, but she had been trained to take orders rather than give them.  He tried to advise her away from an inexperienced commander’s mistakes as best he could and was gratified to see that she listened and learned quickly.  He could support Magna best by being her friend.  

And from the look on her face as she stepped through the rays of evening light that slanted down through the barn timbers, a friend was what she was after at the moment.

“My lady,” Blackwall greeted her warmly, smiling as he set his hammer and chisel aside.  Magna smiled back, but there was a twitch of anxiety in her features.  Something had her ill at ease.  The templar wouldn’t quite meet his gaze.  Something serious then.  “What can I do for you?”

“Just thought I would drop by to see how the griffon was coming along,” she replied, falsely cheerful as she approached him to inspect his work.

Magna had taken an interest in his project as well.  She had been afforded so little time for anything but training and duties among the Templar Order and the Circle, it seemed, that she took pleasure in the simplest things and she was equally happy for anything that would make the lot of the refugees better.  An endearing quality, really, and one that had only begun to emerge since arriving at Skyhold.  He was glad to see that in her, along with her many other good qualities.  Blackwall watched as she ran a hand over the body of the wooden beast, evidently impressed.  

“You’re a man of surprising talents, Warden.”

“Just something I picked up along the way,” he replied modestly, although the compliment made his heart lift a little with pride.

The templar paused, her fingers stroking gently over the wood of the griffon’s flank as if petting a living animal for a moment, and then she turned to face him.  Her expression fell slightly, her brow knitting.

“We’ve been friends for a little while now,” she began as if feeling her way carefully through the words. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about something.  Something personal.”

Blackwall felt his mouth go dry.  She was standing very close to him.  The young woman still would not look him in the eye, clearly already flustered at the awkwardness of whatever she had come to talk about.  In his experience, that kind of hesitation usually pointed to only one thing.

 _Maker’s balls_ , he thought, suddenly self-conscious himself, but he was careful to keep his face neutral.  It was bound to be something other than _that_.  She was young enough to be his daughter.  Though, they did spend a lot of time together.  And they had become close.  Blackwall could still remember her embrace before that last battle at Haven.  He blanched. Surely not . . .

“Of course.  What’s on your mind?”

The Inquisitor frowned, opening her mouth to speak and then reconsidering.  Finally, she seemed to simply give up on phrasing her question tactfully and blundered onward.

“You’re a man of the world.  I’ve heard some of your stories.  You’ve had a lot of experience with women and courtship and - and such things.  I was wondering -- I was hoping . . .”

The question seemed to choke off in Magna’s throat.  The templar was blushing a deep pink now that all but confirmed his suspicions.  It was an intensely strange thing to see on the face of a woman who was otherwise so calm and self-possessed most of the time.  Her hands twisted slowly in front of her.  Her gaze would only rise as far as his chest.

“My lady, you’re a beautiful woman,” Blackwall assured her, leaping uneasily into the floundering silence to buy himself time while his brain spun with the shock of what he was hearing.  He felt his own cheeks redden slightly as a myriad of thoughts surfaced, conjured up by what she seemed to be suggesting.

There had been a time - most of his life, in fact - when Blackwall would have pounced at a girl like the one in front of him with all the craft of a wolf meeting a spring lamb, devouring her off of the bone with neither grace nor gravy.  But that was not who he was anymore; that was exactly the man that he was trying to leave behind him.  And even if he had been so inclined, Magna deserved far better than the likes of him.  This would help no one.  Least of all her.  He needed to let her down gently.

“There’s no man in the world who could refuse you easily, but-”

“What?” Magna interjected, her green eyes widening in surprise and her posture suddenly coming erect.  An alarmed look crossed her face.  “Oh, no!  No, I didn’t mean -- not that you’re not -- not that I wouldn’t-”  

She buried her face in her hands with a frustrated groan.  

“Maker’s breath.  Can we start this conversation again?”

“I think that would be best, yes,” Blackwall grunted in agreement, breathing out a soundless sigh of relief himself.  So, _that_ crisis was averted.  But it wasn’t far off the mark.  He waited as Magna collected herself for a moment before continuing.

“I have feelings for someone and I don’t know whether I should do anything about it - with who I am and who he is and . . . all of this.  I was hoping that you might give me your advice, having more experience with this kind of thing.”

Blackwall regarded the templar for a moment, watching as her shoulders dropped slightly with the relief of the confession.  This would be the first time she had spoken of it aloud, no doubt.  He didn’t have to think too hard to narrow down the possibilities.

“This someone would be Commander Cullen, then.”

She looked up at him, astonished.

“How did you know?”

Blackwall chuckled, leaning on his workbench and raising an eyebrow at her.  It was well known to every soldier in Skyhold that their commander held the Inquisitor in more than just high esteem.  He hadn’t realized that she was carrying the same torch, but it made sense.  Her blush deepened.

“He watches from the wall top sometimes when we spar.  It’s definitely not me he’s looking at, so it doesn’t take much to count two and two together.”

“He does?” Magna asked, smiling slightly for an instant, a pleased uplift in her tone and then she shook her head, frowning again.  “I didn’t realize.”

It was all Blackwall could do to keep from teasing at her.  He remembered very clearly what it had been like to be her age, trying to feel his way through his first fumbling encounters with girls.  He remembered having this same talk with dozens of younger soldiers over the years. It was strange to hear it from the other side, but vaguely charming.  And it was flattering to learn that Magna trusted him enough to ask his advice on something so delicate.  Now that the heat was off of him, so to speak, Blackwall warmed to the conversation, considering.

“So, you haven’t spoken to him about it?”

“I didn’t know whether I should,” she admitted, vexed once again.  “I’m the Inquisitor and he’s the commanding general.  We have to work together.  I don’t want to make things more difficult than they have to be.  And, given my past . . .”

“Leave your past out of it,” Blackwall advised her, although not without a certain amount of uncomfortable irony given his own circumstances.  “You’re working to make it right.  If that’s not enough, then he’s not the man for you.”

“I was - I _am_ \- a templar,” Magna pointed out, wistfully. “I never expected to have someone in my life in that way.  If we all survive this, I will still be a templar, whatever that will entail after everything’s said and done.  You’re a Warden; you understand what I mean.  I made vows.  My life isn't fully my own to give to someone else.  I don’t know if I can give him a future, if that’s what he eventually wants.  Wouldn’t that be unfair in the end?”

She had a point.  Blackwall had had similar feelings throughout his life.  A soldier could never be certain of coming back from war.  Better not to leave a widow and orphans behind or have a family to worry about and distract from the grim and bloody work.  From the original Warden Blackwall, he had come to understand that it was doubly so among the Wardens.  Their lives were short and consumed with duty against the Blight.  It was kinder simply to go it alone and find solace in drink, comradeship, and the occasional brothel.  But that was a lonely existence, as Blackwall could well attest, and he knew that Magna’s life was lonely and hard enough already.  And for that matter, so was Cullen’s, probably.

“Nothing’s ever certain.  And everyone needs something to hold on to in a war.  It keeps you human, reminds you of what you’re fighting for,” he told her gently, feeling out the words as he said them.  “If it doesn’t last, then it doesn’t - but if it helps you through the dark days, then isn’t that good enough by itself?”

She pondered this for a moment and then sighed, blowing out a deep breath.

“I suppose I should talk to him,” she decided, grimacing.  “Maker’s breath.  Facing down Corypheus’ dragon was easier than this.”

“You’ve got that part right," Blackwall laughed. "It gets easier with practice, though." 

The light was falling, softening into dusk outside.  Too late to continue working.  He grinned at her, cocking his head in curiosity.

“This is seriously your first time courting?  None of the boys in Ostwick ever had the courage to try their luck?”

“I was raised by the Chantry,” Magna explained, shrugging demurely.  “The only thing the Sisters ever told us on the subject of love involved a lot of confusing euphemisms about flowers and bees and lectures on the virtue of chastity.  And the sole advice they gave us at the Circle was just ‘don’t’.”

“Sounds about right,” he grunted and clapped the templar on the shoulder, steering her towards the wide door of the barn and into the yard.  “Come on.  Let’s get you sorted.”

“Where are we going?” she asked, her expression quirking in confusion.

“The tavern.  I can’t have this conversation sober and neither should you.”

 

~~0~~

 

“You think she’s really going to do it?” Sera asked the following afternoon as she and Blackwall stood outside of the Herald’s Rest, watching the Inquisitor pause and square her shoulders bravely before walking through the door of the commander’s tower.  Blackwall smiled.

“I hope so.  We’ll soon find out.”

“Bet you a pie she turns tail.  Or Cullen does.  How do they get more little templars anyway if they don’t teach them how to get their kits off once in awhile?”

“There are married templars, I hear.  Besides, the Lady Inquisitor is a noblewoman.  She was brought up to be chaste.”

“Pff, not from all the nobles I’ve ever seen,” the elven Red Jenny huffed. “Chased around the room more like.”

The side door of the tower opened and Blackwall watched Magna emerge with Cullen behind her.  Even from this distance, they looked nervous.

“Here we go, then,” he murmured, crossing his arms and leaning back against the tavern wall, satisfied.  

The two former Templars walked a ways down the wall top and paused, facing each other.  Neither’s face was visible, but Blackwall saw the commander take a step towards Magna, his shoulders relaxing very slightly.  A serious conversation was happening and he could sense Sera’s impatience.

“Ugh, stop talking to her and just snog her already,” she muttered, rolling her eyes, and Blackwall shushed her, frowning.

Just as the commander had started to lean in, though, a soldier emerged from the tower and walked towards the two lovebirds on a direct course to interrupt the moment.

“Aw, Andraste’s flaming ass, no,” Blackwall cursed, scowling and glancing to Sera.  “Get your bow and put that idiot out of his misery.”

“Too late,” she giggled, pointing upwards.  

Blackwall turned back to see Cullen step away from Magna, who appeared to be trying to blend backwards into the stonework in embarrassment, to deliver what must have been a practically volcanic glare at the offending soldier as the man stopped in his tracks and quickly backpedaled away.  He chuckled along with the elf as the soldier retreated back to the safety of the tower and, before either of them could comment further, Cullen turned back to Magna and wrapped his arms around her.  Victory!

“Ha!” Blackwall chortled, grinning.  “Good on the commander.  I’ll take that pie in apple, if you please.”

“Piss.  Bloody Templars,” Sera exclaimed, as if disgusted about losing the bet, but she was grinning, too.  “Looks like Her Gracious Ladybits might get some loosening up after all, though.  About time.”


End file.
